TikTok Carousel Size in 2026: Dimensions, Ratios and Safe Zones
The exact pixel dimensions, aspect ratios, slide limits and safe zones for TikTok photo carousels — plus how to resize App Store screenshots without cropping your UI.
The recommended TikTok carousel size is 1080 × 1920 pixels — a 9:16 vertical aspect ratio. That is the full-screen format TikTok renders natively. A carousel can hold up to 35 images, TikTok accepts JPG, PNG and WebP files, and individual images should stay under roughly 20MB.
If you are mid-export and just needed the number, you have it. The rest of this page covers the parts that actually break carousels: safe zones where TikTok's own interface covers your text, the 9:16 vs 4:5 trade-off, and how to convert App Store screenshots into slides without cropping half your app UI.
1. TikTok Carousel Size at a Glance
| Spec | Value |
|---|---|
| Recommended size | 1080 × 1920 px (9:16 vertical) |
| Alternative size | 1080 × 1350 px (4:5 portrait) |
| Square option | 1080 × 1080 px (1:1) |
| Max slides per carousel | 35 images |
| File formats | JPG / JPEG, PNG, WebP |
| Max file size per image | ~20MB (keep slides well under this) |
| Colour space | sRGB (not CMYK, not P3 for safety) |
| Minimum resolution | 720 × 1280 px — below this, expect visible softness |
One rule covers 90% of cases: build every slide on a 1080 × 1920 canvas. Same canvas for every slide in the set — mixing ratios inside one carousel makes TikTok pad the odd ones out and the swipe feels broken. If you also want the posting workflow, see the full step-by-step guide to making a TikTok carousel.
Stop hand-resizing every slide
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2. 9:16 vs 4:5: Which Should You Actually Use?
Almost every specs page tells you "use 9:16" and stops there. The real trade-off is about where the caption lands.
9:16 — 1080 × 1920
Fills the entire screen. Maximum visual impact, feels native next to video. But the caption, username, sound label and action buttons are drawn on top of your image. Anything you place in the lower third or along the right edge can be covered.
4:5 — 1080 × 1350
Sits inside the screen rather than filling it, so TikTok has room to place the caption below your artwork instead of over it. Less overlap risk, less visual dominance. Also the safer ratio if you cross-post the same file to Instagram.
Practical guidance for the tiktok carousel 4:5 vs 9:16 decision:
- Use 9:16 when your slide is mostly image, illustration or app screenshot and your text lives in the middle band. Highest ceiling.
- Use 4:5 when your slides are text-dense — long tips, code snippets, pricing tables, feature comparisons — and you cannot afford the bottom of the slide being covered.
- Use 1:1 essentially never for TikTok alone. It wastes a third of the screen. It only makes sense as a cross-posting compromise.
The hybrid approach: design on a 1080 × 1920 canvas, but treat the middle 1080 × 1350 region as your layout box. You get the full-bleed background of 9:16 with the overlap safety of 4:5.
3. TikTok Carousel Safe Zones (Where Text Gets Covered)
TikTok does not publish an official safe-zone template for photo posts. The bands below are measured approximations on a 1080 × 1920 canvas, and they shift between app versions, devices and aspect ratios — a notch phone, a tablet and an Android device with a taller screen all render the overlay slightly differently. Treat them as generous margins, not exact coordinates.
Top band — roughly the first 200–250px
Occupied by the device status bar (clock, battery, signal) and TikTok's "Following / For You" tab switcher plus the search icon. Anything you place here competes with system chrome. Keep headline text below it.
Bottom band — roughly the last 400–500px
The biggest killer. This area carries your username, the caption, hashtags, the sound/music ticker, the swipe-progress dots, and on the bottom edge the app's navigation bar. A long caption pushes this band even higher. Never put your CTA, your logo or the punchline of a slide down here.
Right rail — roughly the last 150–200px of width
Profile avatar, like, comment, bookmark, share and the spinning sound disc stack vertically down the right edge, mostly in the lower two-thirds. Right-aligned text and right-side product screenshots get partially hidden behind these icons.
The simple version of the TikTok carousel safe zone rule: keep every element that must be readable inside a centred box of roughly 880 × 1300px, starting about 250px down from the top. Backgrounds, gradients and textures can and should bleed to all four edges — only the meaning-carrying elements need to respect the box.
Fastest way to check:post the carousel as private/"Only me" first, open it in your own feed, and screenshot it. Two minutes of checking beats guessing at pixel bands that change every few releases.
4. How Many Photos Can a TikTok Carousel Have?
A TikTok carousel can contain up to 35 photos. That is the hard ceiling in the app's photo mode. There is no minimum beyond two — a single image posts as a photo post rather than a carousel.
The ceiling is not the target. In practice the sets that hold attention are far shorter:
- 5–8 slides — the sweet spot for tips, listicles and app feature breakdowns. Long enough to deliver value, short enough that people reach the CTA.
- 3–4 slides— best for a single sharp idea, a before/after, or a "here is the problem, here is my app" format.
- 10+ slides — only when each slide is genuinely a separate item people want to save, like a curated list or a step-by-step tutorial.
- 20–35 slides — rare and usually a mistake. Completion rate collapses, and completion is one of the signals that gets carousels pushed further.
5. File Format, File Size and Resolution Limits
JPG/JPEG, PNG and WebP all upload cleanly. Use JPEG at quality 85–90 for photo-heavy slides and PNG for flat colour, screenshots and crisp text — PNG avoids the fuzzy halo JPEG puts around lettering. HEIC straight from an iPhone can be unreliable; convert first.
The practical TikTok carousel file size limit is about 20MB per image. You should never come close. A well-exported 1080 × 1920 slide is typically 300KB–2MB. If a slide is 15MB you have exported at print resolution, and TikTok will recompress it anyway.
1080 × 1920 is the target. Exporting at 2160 × 3840 does not make your slide look sharper — TikTok downsamples and re-encodes it, and oversized uploads sometimes come back softer than a clean 1080-wide file. Do not go below 720 × 1280.
Export in sRGB. Wide-gamut P3 exports can shift noticeably once TikTok converts them. Flatten transparency onto a solid background — a transparent PNG has no defined look on TikTok and can render on unexpected colours.
Your App Store screenshots, already sized for TikTok
Paste your App Store or Play Store link and ReelCarousel builds 9:16 slides around your app — no manual resizing, no cropped UI.
Try ReelCarousel Free6. How to Resize App Store Screenshots for a TikTok Carousel
This is where most app founders get stuck. Your App Store screenshots are already designed, already on-brand — and completely the wrong shape for TikTok. Here is why, and what to do about it.
The shape mismatch
Modern iPhone screenshots are 19.5:9, not 16:9. A 9:16 TikTok slide is wider relative to its height than an iPhone screenshot is. Scaling one to fit inside the other always leaves space.
| Source asset | Size | Fitted into 1080 × 1920 |
|---|---|---|
| iPhone 6.9" (16 Pro Max) | 1320 × 2868 | ~884px wide → ~98px bars each side |
| iPhone 6.7" (15/14 Pro Max) | 1290 × 2796 | ~886px wide → ~97px bars each side |
| iPhone 6.5" (older Max) | 1284 × 2778 | ~887px wide → ~96px bars each side |
| Play Store phone | 1080 × 1920 | Exact match — drop straight in |
Note the last row: Play Store phone screenshots are often already 1080 × 1920. If you ship Android, those assets are a pixel-perfect fit for TikTok and are the fastest source material you have. Google Play accepts a wide range (min 320px, max 3840px on any side), so check what you actually uploaded before assuming.
Your three options
1. Letterbox onto a branded background (recommended)
Scale the screenshot to fit the height, centre it, and fill the ~97px side bars with a brand colour or gradient. Nothing is cropped, no app UI is lost, and the bars read as intentional design rather than as an accident. Even better: shrink the screenshot to ~700–800px wide, place it in the middle band, and use the space above for a hook line.
2. Crop to fill (use with care)
Scale to 1080 wide and you get a 2340px-tall image — roughly 420px has to go. Trim from the top (status bar, nav header) rather than the bottom, since bottom nav bars and CTAs are usually the meaningful part. Never centre-crop a screenshot with caption text baked into it.
3. Redesign the slide around the screenshot
The version that actually performs. Treat the screenshot as one element, not the whole slide: hook text at the top, a tilted or partially cropped phone mockup in the middle, brand background behind everything. This looks native to TikTok; a raw App Store screenshot looks like an ad.
What about device frames?
App Store screenshots often ship with a device bezel already drawn on. On TikTok that reads as advertising, and it costs you pixels twice — once for the frame, once for the letterbox bars. If you can, use the raw un-framed screenshot and add a lighter mockup, or crop into the screen content so the phone is only implied. For the wider strategy around this, see our guide to promoting your app on TikTok.
7. What Happens If Your Images Are the Wrong Size
Upload something narrower than 9:16 and TikTok fills the gap with a stretched, heavily blurred copy of your own image. It looks unpolished and it eats the space your design should own.
Low-resolution or already-compressed slides get re-encoded on upload. Fine lettering picks up a soft halo and thin fonts turn mushy — the most common reason people ask why their carousel looks blurry.
Correct dimensions with bad layout still fails: if your CTA sits in the bottom 400px the caption covers it, and no amount of re-exporting fixes that. This is a safe-zone problem, not a size problem.
Mixing 9:16 and 4:5 slides inside one carousel makes the frame jump on every swipe. Pick one canvas for the whole set.
8. Export Presets You Can Copy
Canva
Create a custom size of 1080 × 1920 px (the "TikTok Video" and "Instagram Story" presets are the same canvas). Export as PNG, or JPG at high quality. Turn off "Compress file" for text-heavy slides. Duplicate the page for each slide so every export is identical in size. We compare the workflow in detail in Canva vs ReelCarousel.
Figma
Frame at 1080 × 1920 (or design at 360 × 640 and export at 3x). Add a guide rectangle at 880 × 1300 centred, locked, and hidden before export — that is your safe zone. Export PNG at 1x from the 1080-wide frame.
Photoshop
New document: 1080 × 1920 px, 72 DPI, RGB / sRGB colour profile. Export via Export As → PNG, or JPG at quality 85. Use artboards, one per slide, and Export Artboards to keep filenames in swipe order.
Phone screenshots
A screenshot from a modern iPhone is roughly 1290 × 2796 — taller than 9:16. Crop ~210px from the top and bottom in Photos, or letterbox it as described above. Never upload a screenshot of a screenshot; each round trip adds compression.
Or skip the canvas setup entirely. Tools like our TikTok carousel maker and AI carousel generator generate correctly sized slides automatically — every export is 1080 × 1920 with the layout already inside the safe zone, so there is no preset to remember and nothing to re-crop.
9. Do the Specs Change for TikTok Carousel Ads?
Mostly no — the creative canvas is the same 1080 × 1920 at 9:16. What changes is the overlay. Paid placements add an ad disclosure label, an advertiser name, and a call-to-action button along the bottom of the frame, which pushes the unusable bottom band higher than it is on organic posts.
Practical adjustments for ad creative:
- Leave more bottom clearance than organic — assume the lower ~500px is spoken for.
- Do not bake your own fake CTA button near the real one; it looks broken.
- Ad specs and character limits change more often than organic ones — confirm current requirements in TikTok Ads Manager before a launch rather than trusting any blog post, including this one.
10. Summary: TikTok Carousel Size
- 1080 × 1920 px, 9:16 — the default canvas for every slide
- 1080 × 1350 px, 4:5 — the alternative when text density matters more than screen fill
- Up to 35 slides — but 5–8 is where carousels actually perform
- JPG, PNG or WebP under ~20MB — aim for under 2MB per slide, sRGB
- Keep key elements inside a centred ~880 × 1300 box — the caption, right rail and nav bar cover the rest
- Letterbox App Store screenshots, do not crop them — ~97px branded bars beat losing your app UI
- Same ratio across the whole set — mixed canvases break the swipe
Getting the dimensions right is table stakes. What separates carousels that convert from carousels that get ignored is posting a lot of them consistently — which is exactly why ReelCarousel handles the sizing so you can spend your time on the hook instead of the export dialog.
Get 30 days of correctly sized carousels
One App Store URL in, a month of 1080 × 1920 TikTok slideshows out — generated, sized and ready to schedule.
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What size should a TikTok carousel be?
1080 × 1920 pixels, a 9:16 vertical aspect ratio. This fills the screen and matches how TikTok renders photo posts natively. 1080 × 1350 (4:5) is a valid alternative when you want the caption to sit below your artwork instead of over it.
How many photos can you post on a TikTok carousel?
Up to 35 photos in a single carousel. Most high-performing carousels use 5–8 slides — completion rate drops sharply on very long sets, and completion is one of the signals that drives reach.
What is the TikTok carousel aspect ratio?
9:16 is the recommended aspect ratio. TikTok also accepts 4:5 and 1:1, but anything narrower than 9:16 gets padded with a blurred fill. Use one ratio consistently across every slide in a carousel.
Can you post square images on TikTok?
Yes — 1080 × 1080 uploads fine, and TikTok pads the space above and below with a blurred version of your image. It works, but it wastes roughly a third of the screen, so square is only worth it if you are reusing one file across TikTok and Instagram.
Why do my TikTok carousel images look blurry?
Usually one of three causes: the source file is below 1080px wide, it was already compressed before upload (a screenshot of a screenshot, or a re-saved JPEG), or the aspect ratio is wrong so TikTok is showing you the blurred pillarbox fill rather than your actual image. Export fresh at 1080 × 1920 from the original design file.
What size are App Store screenshots and will they work on TikTok?
iPhone App Store screenshots are typically 1320 × 2868 (6.9"), 1290 × 2796 (6.7") or 1284 × 2778 (6.5") — all roughly 19.5:9, taller than TikTok's 9:16. They will upload, but they need adapting: scale to fit the height (~886px wide) and fill the side bars with a brand colour, rather than cropping your app UI. Play Store phone screenshots are frequently already 1080 × 1920 and can be used as-is.