LinkedIn Carousel Size in 2026: Dimensions, PDF Limits and Ad Specs

An organic LinkedIn carousel is a document post: a PDF you attach to a post, which LinkedIn shows as pages people swipe through. LinkedIn sets no pixel size for it. LinkedIn's help page on uploading documents gives only two hard limits, 100 MB and 300 pages, and one layout rule: every page must be the same size.

So the size is your choice, and two sizes do the job. Use 1080 x 1350 pixels per page (a 4:5 portrait) when most of your readers are on a phone. Use 1080 x 1080 pixels (a 1:1 square) when you want to reuse the slides elsewhere. Export one PDF with every page at that size.

A LinkedIn carousel ad is a different thing with different rules. LinkedIn's carousel ad specifications ask for 2 to 10 separate image cards, each a 1080 x 1080 pixel square of 10 MB or less, built in Campaign Manager. A PDF made for a document post cannot be uploaded as a carousel ad, and the 10 card limit does not apply to a document post.

The two formats are built in different places by different people. Anyone can add a document to a post from the homepage, a Group or a LinkedIn Page they manage. A carousel ad is built in Campaign Manager, and LinkedIn's carousel ad specifications say you need a role on the Page (super admin, content admin or Sponsored Content poster) plus creative manager access or higher on the ad account.

They are also read differently. A document post opens as full pages, so it suits teaching: a walkthrough, a checklist, a short report. A carousel ad shows square cards that LinkedIn scales to 312 x 312 pixels, each with a headline and its own link. LinkedIn's carousel ad tips recommend starting with 3 to 5 cards and testing more from there. The same page points out that the first card shows in full in the feed and the second only partly, so those two images matter most, and it suggests putting the main call to action on the last card.

Links work in opposite ways. In a carousel ad every card can point to its own destination URL, unless you attach a Lead Gen Form, in which case all cards open the same form. In a document, nothing is clickable until the reader downloads the file.

A document ad sits between the two: the same kind of file as a document post, promoted through Campaign Manager. LinkedIn's document ad specifications allow up to five documents, show the ad in the feed and on the LinkedIn Audience Network, and accept only PDFs when the objective is lead generation. The headline is filled in from the file name and is cut after about 70 characters, so name the file like a title before you upload it.

Page shape is the one place where LinkedIn's advice for ads differs from the advice of the published guides. Its document ads best practices ask for a standard layout and list ten of them, from Statement (5.5 x 8.5 in) through Letter and A4 to Tabloid (11 x 17 in). The same page says to avoid lengthy documents because the document player has no search, and to keep prices and other details that go out of date to a minimum. For an organic post, a 4:5 page is still the better use of a phone screen. For a document ad built from an existing white paper, Letter or A4 is what LinkedIn expects.

Yes, in the same three forms. LinkedIn's guide to posting, updated two days before this page was checked, lists Photo for sharing one or more images and Add a document under the More menu of the share box. The document help page still gives 100 MB and 300 pages, and the media file types page, updated in September 2026, repeats both limits and adds the 1 million word cap.

What no longer exists is the separate carousel post type that mixed images and video in one swipeable post. Hootsuite's guide records that LinkedIn launched that format in July 2022 and announced its removal less than a year later. That is why the word carousel on LinkedIn now means a document post when it is organic and an image carousel when it is an ad.

Posting several images at once is still possible, but it is a different post. LinkedIn lays a multi photo post out as a grid whose shape follows the first image, with later images cropped to fit. If you want one slide per swipe, upload a PDF.

A document post can have up to 300 pages and a carousel ad can have 2 to 10 cards. Those are limits. The useful number is much smaller.

LinkedIn's own ads guide recommends keeping a document under 10 pages. Hootsuite suggests 5 to 15 slides and Buffer suggests around six to nine. Socialinsider suggests 8 to 12 and cites a 2026 analysis of 67,765 LinkedIn carousels by MagicPost, in which posts of 9 to 12 slides had a median of 49 likes and posts of 6 to 8 slides had 26.

Read those together and a first carousel of 8 to 10 pages is a safe plan: a cover, six to eight pages of content and a closing page. Ready made slide by slide outlines are in the LinkedIn carousel examples.

Yes, as a multi photo post, which is a separate format from a document. LinkedIn's photo help page lets you select up to 20 images in one post. Each image can be up to 5 MB and at least 552 x 276 pixels, LinkedIn recommends 1080 pixels wide, and the shape has to sit between 3:1 and 4:5. Click Start a post, choose the photo icon and select all the images at once. On the mobile app you can also reorder them before you post.

What people see first is a collage, not a single slide. LinkedIn shows the post at no taller than 4:5 and gives the first image the most room. Two images sit side by side. With three or more, the first image goes on top when it is landscape and in a left column when it is portrait or square, and the rest fill the space beside or below it, cut to equal widths and sometimes cropped. A reader taps the collage to open the images one at a time.

So a photo carousel has to work in both views. Make every slide 1080 x 1350 so each one is whole when it is opened, put the slide that must be read in full first, and keep text away from the edges of the others. Add alt text to each image with the ALT button, which LinkedIn offers on desktop and on mobile.

Can you delete a single photo from a carousel post on LinkedIn? No. The same help page says photos cannot be edited or resized once the post is up, so removing one image means deleting the post and sharing it again. It also notes that a post carries either a link preview or images, not both, so put any link in the text.

Which one to use comes down to how the slides should be read. A document keeps one page per swipe, in order, which suits a walkthrough. A multi photo post suits a set of screenshots that also make sense as a collage. Spreadcast's carousels go out on LinkedIn as multi photo posts, as the last section explains.

Not as one swipeable post. All three carousel formats leave video out. A document shows videos and animations as static images. LinkedIn's carousel ad specifications say video cannot be added to carousel image ads. And Microsoft's reference for LinkedIn's MultiImage API defines a multi image post as 2 to 20 images and accepts nothing else.

Video goes in a post of its own. LinkedIn's video FAQ says you can add only one video to a single post, and that you can add closed captions to it. If a carousel needs movement, put the most telling frame in the carousel as a still and post the clip separately, then mention it in the caption.

A document post works from a LinkedIn Page as well as from a profile. LinkedIn's document help page lists your homepage, a Group and a LinkedIn Page as places to add one. To post as the Page you need to be a super admin or a content admin, per LinkedIn's help page on posting as a Page. Open the Page's admin view, go to Posts, start a post, then use More and Add a document as in the steps above. The file rules do not change: one PDF, every page the same size, 100 MB and 300 pages at most.

Boosting is where a Page and a profile differ, and it decides which carousel format to build if you plan to pay for reach. LinkedIn's help page on boosting Page posts lists text, single image, event, video, document, article and newsletter posts as ones a Page can boost, billed through Campaign Manager, and multi image posts are not on that list. LinkedIn's help page on boosting from your profile has it the other way round: text, single or multi image, article, video and newsletter posts can be boosted, and documents cannot.

So can you boost a carousel post on LinkedIn? From a Page, boost the document version. From your own profile, boost the multi photo version. The profile page adds that a boosted post becomes an ad and is reviewed before it runs, usually within 24 hours. Spreadcast publishes to personal profiles only, so a carousel for a Company Page is posted by hand, or the founder's post is reshared from the Page.

Spreadcast is app marketing automation for social media. You paste your App Store link at the start page, and each app update, 5 star review and rating milestone becomes a designed post that is published to LinkedIn and seven other networks.

Those posts are single images of 1080 x 1350 pixels. On the Create page you can also ask for a carousel of 3 to 8 slides in your app's brand. On LinkedIn it is published from your personal profile as a multi image post, so it follows the rules in the photo carousel section above, not the document rules. Spreadcast does not export PDFs and does not post to Company Pages, so a document post is still something you build yourself. The LinkedIn post generator covers the single image side, and the LinkedIn MCP server page covers making the same posts from Claude or ChatGPT.

For the rest of the job, see social media image sizes for every other LinkedIn size, App Store screenshot sizes if your slides use app screenshots, the creative teardowns for layout ideas and how to promote an app on social media for the plan around it.