New Instagram update finally lets users add unique captions to every carousel slide and creators are thrilled

Dubai: If you have ever posted a carousel on Instagram and wished you could write something different for each photo instead of cramming everything into one caption, your time has finally come.

Instagram began rolling out a new feature on 18 June that lets users add individual captions to each slide in a carousel post. The captions update dynamically as viewers swipe through, so every photo or video can now have its own context sitting right below it.

Meta, Instagram's parent company, described it as "a long-requested feature," which feels like an understatement. Creators, brands and casual users have been asking for this for years.

How the old system worked

Until now, carousel posts only supported a single caption that sat beneath the entire post regardless of which slide the viewer was looking at. If you wanted to say something specific about slide three or give context to slide seven, you had two options: either type it all into one long caption and hope people scrolled down far enough to read it, or manually edit text onto the images themselves before uploading.

Neither was ideal, especially for tutorials, travel dumps, product showcases, event roundups or anything that told a story across multiple images. The caption would just sit there, static, while the content above it changed with every swipe.

How the new feature works

The update is simple. When creating a carousel post, you will now see a toggle in the caption field that lets you switch between "Single caption" and "Multiple captions." Single remains the default, so nothing changes for anyone who prefers the old way.

If you select multiple captions, you can swipe through each slide within the posting screen and write a unique caption for each one. When someone views the finished post and swipes through, the caption beneath the image will update to match whichever slide they are on.

That is it. One toggle.

The current carousel limit remains at 20 slides, which means you can now have up to 20 individual captions on a single post.

Small quality of life update

On the surface, this is a small quality-of-life update. In practice, it could change how people approach carousel content entirely.

Carousels are already one of Instagram's strongest engagement formats. They have consistently outperformed Reels in terms of engagement per post since 2023, largely because they encourage users to spend more time swiping through content rather than scrolling past it. Adding individual captions is likely to increase that dwell time even further, which in turn signals to Instagram's algorithm that the post is worth showing to more people.

For creators and businesses, this opens up much cleaner formats for step-by-step guides, recipe breakdowns, product comparisons, before-and-after posts, travel itineraries, and anything that benefits from matching text to specific visuals.

It also makes carousels more accessible. Users with visual impairments who rely on screen readers will now get slide-specific context rather than a single block of text that may or may not relate to the image they are on.

The feature will roll out to phones over time.