Take one slide out of an Instagram carousel

How the slides in a carousel are ordered and counted

A carousel is one post holding up to ten items. The poster fixes their order when they publish, and that order never changes afterwards. Slide one is what appears in the grid, and the rest sit behind swipe arrows in the sequence the poster chose.

The dots under the picture are the counter. Ten dots means ten items, and the filled dot marks where you are in the run. Counting the dots before you paste tells you how many items the post holds, which is worth knowing when only one of them is the video you came for.

What the address says, and what it leaves out

A carousel uses the same address shape as an ordinary feed post: the letter p followed by a short code. That code names the post as a whole. Nothing in it identifies a slide, and nothing changes as you swipe on a phone.

On a computer, swiping sometimes appends a small parameter recording the slide you were viewing. It is a note about your position rather than an instruction, and it does not narrow the results to that item. Whether you keep it or trim everything from the question mark onwards, Analyze reads the same post.

Finding your slide in the results list

Since the address cannot select a slide, the selection happens after Analyze. The results list reports the video files the post is serving, and a carousel holding three clips produces rows for all three, grouped by the item they belong to.

Sizes and runtimes are how you tell the groups apart. A fifteen-second clip and a minute-long clip in the same post look nothing alike in megabytes. Before you paste, note the position of the slide you want and roughly how long it runs, and the matching group in the list becomes obvious.

• Count the dots to see how many items the post holds.
• Swipe to the slide you want and note its position and length.
• Paste the post address once and read the whole results list.
• Match the group by size and runtime, then download that row.

Slides that are photographs rather than clips

Carousels mix media freely. A common shape is several stills with one clip somewhere in the middle, and posters use that to put a short video among a set of pictures. The dots count all of the items, so ten dots does not promise ten videos.

The results list holds video files only. A still slide is an image and produces no downloadable row, which is why a post with nine photographs and one clip returns a short list. If the whole carousel is photographs, the list comes back empty, and that empty result is the correct answer for a post with no video in it.

One post, several downloads

Each row you save is a separate download. A carousel with three clips in it therefore costs three of the 3 downloads a free account gets in a day, and that count returns to three at midnight UTC. Take the slide you actually need first, in case the day's count runs out.

The 150 MB ceiling on free use applies to each file on its own, not to the post as a whole. Carousel clips are short and stay well under it. Pro removes the daily count and the ceiling, and removes the ads, which suits somebody pulling every clip out of a long post.

Accounts that approve their followers

A private account serves its carousels only to approved followers who are signed in. Vidzilla reads every page as a signed-out visitor, so a private post returns nothing however many slides it holds. Being signed in yourself changes nothing, because the reading happens on our servers rather than in your browser.

Who the slides belong to

The person who published the carousel owns what is in it, and a set of ten slides is ten pieces of their work rather than a free collection. Saving your own posts is straightforward. For anyone else's, permission stays with them, and Vidzilla has no relationship with Instagram and cannot grant it.

Related pages

• Reels, feed posts and carousels compared
• Single Reels on their own
• Highlight collections on a profile
• When the slide you want is a photograph
• Working through several saves in a row