How do I make an Instagram carousel without Photoshop or Canva?

Open Postfolio in your browser, drop in your photos, pick a layout — frames, panorama, journal, magazine — and export. The slides come out at 1080 × 1350 as PNG, ready to post. No account, no artboards, no subscription; your photos never leave your device.

Photoshop can do anything, which is exactly the problem at 5 pm when prime posting time is at 6 and nothing is ready: artboards, guides, the export dialog, one slide at a time. Canva is faster but wants an account, treats a carousel as a stack of separate pages, and puts the useful features behind a subscription.

For a photo carousel — a series of finished photographs with consistent margins and maybe a line of type — neither is the right tool. Here is the workflow that takes about a minute.

From camera roll to carousel in three moves

1. Drop in your photos. Open the free web app — nothing to install, no login. Add the photos for the carousel; they stay in your browser's local storage and are never uploaded anywhere.
2. Pick a layout. Choose a template family: a plain gallery border, the frames look, a seamless panorama, or an editorial set such as Journal (ten matched pages in one tap) or Magazine (a real cover with editorial type). Adjust margins, palette and text; everything stays editable.
3. Export. One tap exports every slide at Instagram's exact size — 1080 × 1350 for posts, 1080 × 1920 for stories — as PNG, with nothing recompressed. Upload the set to Instagram in order.

What you give up — honestly

Postfolio is not a photo editor. It does not do curves, retouching or masks; you bring finished photos. It is also not a general design tool: no presentations, no stock illustrations, no thousand fonts. If your carousel is a marketing deck with icons and charts, Canva is the better fit. If it is photographs, Postfolio is faster and gentler on the pixels.

What it costs

The web app is free forever — no login, no watermark, no time limit. The iOS app is a free download with the full editor; exporting layouts that use Pro designs (batch export, 2× resolution, brand kit, the extra template families) is a single one-time purchase. There is no subscription, and there never will be.

Questions, answered straight.