TLDR
Pinterest's carousel is the carousel pin: one pin holding 2–5 swipeable images, shown with dots underneath. The catch: creating one requires a business account in an ad market, on desktop, through Ads Manager or the Bulk Editor. Build cards at 2:3 or 1:1 — Pinterest's rule is one ratio per carousel; 1000×1500 and 1000×1000 are the standard exports — as JPG or PNG up to 20MB each. The format suits Pinterest's search-first surface: the carousel ranks like any pin with the first card as its face, and the swipe delivers a sequence searchers can save whole.
What a Pinterest carousel actually is
Pinterest supports carousels natively — the feature is just named in a way nobody searches for. A carousel pin is a single pin containing two to five images; viewers swipe through them in place, and small dots under the pin signal there's more than one card. Saves keep the whole set: repin the carousel and all its cards travel together.
The naming confusion runs both directions. People searching "how to make a slideshow on Pinterest" usually want exactly this — several images in one pin — while Pinterest's video-style formats (video pins, and the retired idea-pin format that got folded into regular pins) auto-play rather than swipe. If you want viewers to control the pace, the carousel pin is the format.
The mechanic will feel familiar if you make carousels anywhere else: it's the same self-paced swipe that powers an Instagram carousel post — but planted in a search engine rather than a feed, which changes the design job more than the specs do.
Carousel pin specs
Two Pinterest-specific notes on those numbers. First, 2:3 vertical is the platform's native shape — it earns the most height in the masonry grid, the same way 4:5 earns feed space on Instagram (the cross-platform sizing logic is in our Instagram carousel size guide). Second, the five-card ceiling is low compared to Instagram's 20-slide feed carousels or TikTok's 35-image photo posts — Pinterest carousels are a tight format, which rewards sequences that were planned as five beats rather than trimmed down from twenty.
How to post a carousel on Pinterest
First, the gate — carousels don't live in the regular pin composer. Pinterest builds them through its ads tooling: a business account (free to switch), in a country where Pinterest ads operate, on desktop. The mobile app can't create them at all — Pinterest points mobile users to video Pins instead.
1. Switch to a business account, on desktop
Personal accounts don't get the carousel option anywhere. Converting is free, and your profile, boards and followers survive the switch.
Business accounts are public. If your personal account is private, Pinterest requires making it public before you can convert.
2. Build the carousel in Ads Manager (or the Bulk Editor)
In Ads Manager's pin builder, upload 2–5 cards — despite the tool's name, the result publishes as a pin on your profile, and promoting it as an ad is optional. Order matters: the first image is the carousel's face everywhere. Keep every card one ratio — export all at 1000×1500 or all at 1000×1000; the set shares one frame, so a stray square card in a vertical carousel won't display cleanly. The Bulk Editor does the same via spreadsheet when you're producing several at once.
3. Title, description, link, publish
Write the title and description for search — that's where pins live — and attach your destination link. Then publish and check the live pin: swipe through all cards once to confirm order and cropping survived.
No business account, or not in an ad market?
The honest alternatives: pin the cards as separate pins collected on one board — they rank individually in search but lose the swipe sequence — or turn the slides into a short video Pin, the format Pinterest itself suggests on mobile.
When a carousel pin beats separate pins
Five cards is a constraint that forces a real decision: does this content belong in one pin or several? The carousel wins when the images are one unit of meaning:
- Step sequences — a five-step recipe, routine, or tutorial reads as one save-able answer instead of five orphaned fragments competing with each other in search.
- Product variants — one product in five colorways or contexts keeps shoppers on a single pin with a single destination link.
- Before/after and transformations — the swipe is the reveal; separate pins spoil it.
- Condensed guides — the top-five version of a longer piece, with the full article behind the pin's link.
Separate pins win when each image can earn search traffic on its own merits — five distinct recipes deserve five pins, five targets in search rather than one. The test: if someone would search for card 3 by itself, it probably deserves its own pin.
Designing for a search surface, not a feed
Pinterest changes the carousel design job in three ways that matter more than the pixel sizes:
- The first card is a search result. On Instagram, slide 1 competes in a feed for a swipe; on Pinterest, it competes in a grid of search results for a click. Text-forward covers that name the payoff ("5-day meal prep, one grocery run") outperform pretty-but-vague openers, because searchers are query-matching, not browsing.
- Content lives for months, not hours. Feed carousels spike and decay in days; pins resurface from search indefinitely. That flips the economics — evergreen how-to sequences are worth more here than timely takes, and it's worth updating a carousel's cover card if it stops earning clicks.
- Every card should survive out of context. Viewers arrive mid-carousel from saves and closeups. Card 3 should carry the topic on its face — a numbered step with the sequence name beats a bare fragment.
One more search-surface habit worth stealing: treat the pin's title and description as seriously as the cards themselves. Pins surface through query matching, so a carousel titled with the searcher's words ("small apartment storage ideas") gets found; the same carousel titled with a clever pun doesn't. Write the title first, then check the cover card repeats its promise visually.
The good news: the production skills transfer wholesale. If you already design slides for Instagram, TikTok carousels, or the 4-image grid on X, Pinterest asks for the same one-idea-per-card discipline at a taller ratio and a shorter length.
Design once, export everywhere
Carousel-pin cards are just images, so any workflow that exports clean, correctly sized slides already works for Pinterest.
The honest state of the pitch: xcarousel generates a designed carousel from a topic, URL, or PDF and exports pixel-exact slides — but there's no Pinterest preset yet, so 2:3 isn't a one-click export the way Instagram's 1080×1350 is. The square 1080×1080 export does drop straight into Pinterest's 1:1 carousel option, and the expensive parts — writing a five-beat sequence, designing consistent cards, exporting sharp images — are the parts the tool compresses to about a minute. Upload the cards in Ads Manager's pin builder, write the search-facing title, and publish.