How do you make a seamless panorama on Instagram?

January 22, 2022

I often have beautiful photos of my lanterns that are too wide to display well on Instagram but I manage to use them because I learned how to post panorama on instagram.

I noticed a panorama post on Instagram that I thought would fix this

Then I noticed people publishing carousel posts on Instagram where, when you slide back and forth over the image, it’s like you're sliding the photo so that you can see it in its entirety. I have to crop wide and shallow for banners on my homepage as a result I learned to use keynote to do this long ago - there are two of these banners on my home page here. In fact being able to create a banner is probably what I use keynote for the most.

I think carousel panoramas are pretty cool but every tutorial I found on how to do it uses Photoshop or Lightroom. The one I watched is by Becki and Chris on Youtube which was excellent but here I'll show you how to do it with more basic skills.

I'll show you how to make a panorama easily

Photoshop/Lightroom/Illustrator are great but these programs are expensive and have a really steep learning curve but the effect below is what you end up with, so its worth a bit of effort.

tutorial on making your own instagram panorama tutorial

You can make a panorama post with just some clever cropping

In fact, all that is needed is use the basic programs that come with a computer to performs some really clever cropping and I show you in the tutorial below.

Follow along my panorama crop tutorial and give it a go.

I created a video for you to follow along. It's a screencast and you can see my curser moving and showing all the steps to create the crops but here are the steps below. For now, this tutorial is for those using a MAC and KEYNOTE ...... I'll do another one for PC people.... for POWERPOINT.

This is the photo I started with

A photo of four lanterns that spell out the word love - lit up in the evening on the window overlooking a snowy scene.

I think you can see that the view out the window and the table are actually of no interest though the narrow band in the middle is quite pretty. The best part of my photo is very short and wide which is exactly the opposite of what instagram likes.

Love my "LOVE" monogram?..... You can find it here.

Tutorial to Make a Sliding Wide Photo that fits Instagram - USING KEYNOTE.

To fix this you’re going to make a slide show with two slides sized for Instagram. Here are the steps working on a MAC. If you are on a PC you can use PowerPoint to do the same thing.

Part 1 - Crop Your image to the best size for instagram (1350px by 2160px - I show you how to do this in the video)

Open Keynote and set up the document to the correct size. I show you this in the video.... its super easy I promise.
Copy and paste in your image. Position it in the slide.
Export this and Keynote will do the cropping for you. You will end up with this.

Part 2 - Slicing your image into two parts (1350px by 1080px .... Once again... its in my video)

Open up another blank Keynote presentation and once again set up the slide size.(1350px by 1080px)
Copy and paste in the image that Keynote created for you in Part 1 and position it so it's all the way over to the left.
Duplicate this slide and then slide the image over to the right. I tell you exactly where in the video but all you are really doing is lining up your image with the right hand edge.
Export the presentation and Keynote will crop your image into two equal slices like the photo below

And that's it.

Upload your photos and you will have a cool paranormal carousel on Instagram that will look like it's sliding seamlessly across the screen. Its a really captivating effect but really it's just clever cropping.

A video screeencast showing all the steps needed to crop an instagram panorama