How to Make a Slideshow on TikTok: Steps, Sizes and Specs

To make a slideshow on TikTok, open the app, tap Add post (+), tap Photo, then Upload, and pick up to 35 images in the order you want them. Tap Next, add text, a sound and any edits to each photo, tap Next again to write the description and set the cover, then tap Post. This page is the step-by-step version, with specs; for the strategy behind what goes on each slide, see our complete guide to TikTok slideshows.

The steps above come from TikTok's own Creator Academy guide to photo posts (checked 5 October 2026). TikTok moves buttons around between app versions, so if a label on your phone differs, the order of the flow is what to follow.

How to make a slideshow on TikTok, step by step

• Tap Add post (+) at the bottom of the TikTok app.
• Tap Photo, then Upload, and choose your images from your camera roll. TikTok allows up to 35 in one post.
• Tap Next. Swipe between your photos and edit each one: add text, a sound, a filter or stickers, or crop it.
• Tap Next again to finish the post: edit the cover, write the description, add hashtags, tag people, add a location or a link, and set who can see it.
• Tap Post, or Drafts to save it. Drafts are visible only to you.

That's the whole flow. The rest of this page is about the decisions inside it, because the buttons take a minute and the decisions are where slideshows win or lose.

TikTok slideshow size and specs

Specs checked against TikTok's pages on 5 October 2026.

A caveat on that table. TikTok's guide to organic photo posts gives the 35-image limit and the description length, but it doesn't name a pixel size or a file type. The size and format rows lean on TikTok's ad and developer documentation, which describe the same photo format from a different door. In practice, anything your phone's camera roll shows will upload; the reason to export at 1080 × 1920 is that a 9:16 image fills the screen and text you place near the edges doesn't get cropped.

The one sizing rule TikTok itself does state for photo posts: crop all photos to the same ratio "to give it a cleaner look". Mixed ratios are what make a slideshow look like a camera-roll dump with letterboxing.

Photo mode or a template: pick before you start

TikTok has two ways to turn photos into a post, and they produce different things.

Photo mode posts are still images that viewers "swipe through at their own pace", in TikTok's words, with a sound underneath. TikTok introduced Photo Mode in October 2022 as "carousel posts of still images that automatically display one after another", so a viewer who doesn't swipe still sees the slides advance. Every photo mode post has a /photo/ link rather than a /video/ one. Templates take your photos and render them into a video: the timing, transitions and effects come from the template, and the result plays like any other TikTok. TikTok's help centre describes picking a template and tapping Try this template, and notes that templates aren't available on every account, so treat the exact steps as "if you see it". There's no swipe; the viewer watches.

Which one? For anything the viewer reads (tips, lists, steps, a story told in text) use photo mode. The swipe is the point: each slide has to earn the next one, and the viewer controls the pace, so a dense slide doesn't fly past before it's read. Templates suit montage content where the music and motion carry it: a trip, an event, a before-and-after reveal timed to a beat.

There's also a lopsidedness in the slideshows we analyse. Nearly every slideshow we've broken down slide by slide was a photo mode post; templates barely appear (see "About our numbers" below). That says more about which accounts our customers track than about TikTok, but it does mean every pattern on this page comes from photo mode.

Each step, and what goes wrong at it

Choosing photos

The order you tap photos in is the order they appear. Pick slide 1 first, deliberately, and then the rest in sequence. Rearranging later is fiddlier than getting it right at selection.

What goes wrong: people pick the "best" image first, rather than the one that makes someone stop. Slide 1 is your cover. On the feed it's the only slide anyone sees before deciding to swipe, so it needs to state a promise, not just look nice. (Covers are covered properly in our complete guide to TikTok slideshows.)

Adding text to each slide

On the edit screen, swipe to the slide and tap Text. You can also design the text into the image before you upload it, in Canva, Figma or a phone editor, which gives you more control over fonts and placement.

What goes wrong: too much of it. In the slideshows we analysed, the median slide carried 56 characters of on-image text. Outside our heaviest single creator, about 1 slide in 10 ran past 150 characters (9.9%); that creator alone pushes the overall figure to 18.6%, which is why we quote the lower number with this disclosure. A slide with a paragraph on it reads like homework.

Keep text away from the bottom of the frame, where the caption and buttons sit, and from the right edge, where the like, comment and share column overlays the image.

Picking a sound

Tap Sound on the edit screen. TikTok's guidance for brands is to use a commercially licensed track or one you have rights to, from its Commercial Music Library.

In our sample, sound mostly does mood work: our model labelled the music's role "mood" in 83% of the slideshows we analysed, and 13% had no music role at all. It's background, not the content. That's a model label, and trend fit was "medium" for most posts, so we can't tell you trending audio is typical. If you want the case for trending sounds, read how to use trending sounds on TikTok; the honest summary for slideshows is that a sound that matches the mood of the slides is enough.

Writing the description

After the second Next, you get the description field (up to 4,000 characters), hashtags, tags, location, link and privacy.

What goes wrong: nothing, often, because most creators barely use it. In our sample 41% of captions were hashtags only, and the median caption without hashtags was 14 characters. TikTok's own advice points the other way: it suggests using the description to share information, add context and "call for engagement", and to write descriptive captions so the post turns up in TikTok search. A slideshow has no spoken words for search to read, so the description and the on-image text are what TikTok has to go on.

Setting the cover

On the final screen, Edit image cover lets you pick which photo represents the post on your profile grid. Choose the one that works as a thumbnail at small size. It's usually slide 1 anyway, but on a profile grid a busy text slide can turn into a grey smudge.

Posting or saving a draft

Post publishes it; Drafts keeps it on your profile, visible only to you. If you're unsure about the order or the text on a slide, save a draft and look at it on your phone an hour later. Small type you could read on the edit screen is often too small in the feed.

How many photos to put in

TikTok allows 35. Few slideshows get anywhere near that. In the slideshows we analysed, the median was 3 slides (p25 2, p75 5, p90 8), and 2 slides was the single most common length. A few creators account for a large share of the sample; without the most prolific of them, the median is still 3.

That's a description of what our sample posts, not a recommendation, and slide count showed no usable relationship with views per follower (Spearman rho −0.03). So the right number is the number your content needs. A three-step tutorial is four slides (cover plus three). A "12 things" list is 13. Don't pad a list to look substantial, and don't cram a list onto two slides to keep it short.

For the full distribution and how slide count relates to our model's scores, see how many slides a TikTok slideshow should have.

What the slideshows in our sample do

About our numbers. fypnow analyses TikTok slideshows slide by slide; the figures here are as of 5 October 2026. The slideshows come from accounts our customers track or inspect in fypnow, not a random sample of TikTok. They lean toward business, finance, motivation and education creators, and a few creators account for a large share of them. Labels such as "hook" or "payoff", and every score, are ratings from one AI model reading the slides, not measured outcomes.

With that caveat attached, four patterns are worth copying because they're about structure, not niche:

• Slide 1 is a hook. Our model labelled the first slide a hook in 97.6% of the slideshows we analysed. (The analysis expects a hook on slide 1, so read this as "almost nobody opens with filler", not as a discovery.)
• The payoff comes at the end. In slideshows of 4 or more slides, the payoff sat on the last or second-to-last slide in 83% of them, and on the very last slide in 50%.
• Cover text is short. The median cover with text carried 49 characters, about 9 words, and 6% of covers had no text at all.
• Covers often carry a number. 44% of English cover texts contain a digit, though that also catches prices and dates; the strict "N tips / N ways" pattern matched only 10%.

Put together, the shape that keeps appearing is a promise on slide 1, the content in the middle, and the thing the cover promised held back until the end. If you only take one idea from this section, take that one: decide what your last slide delivers before you design the first.

Before you make one: study a slideshow that worked

The fastest way to make a better slideshow is to take apart one that already did well in your niche: what the cover promised, how many slides it took to deliver, where the payoff landed.

You can do that by hand, swiping through and noting each slide's job. Or paste the link into fypnow's video analysis, which reads a photo slideshow slide by slide: the on-image text and visual of each slide, its role (hook, setup, value, proof, payoff or call to action), the cover's hook type, the narrative structure and payoff slide, the role of the sound, and three scores for the cover, swipe-through and save-worthiness. Those scores are our model's rating from reading the slides; TikTok doesn't publish where people stop swiping, so nobody outside TikTok can measure it.

From an analysed slideshow, the script generator can write a new slideshow script on the same structure: numbered slide cards in swipe order, each with its on-image text, role and a visual direction, plus a caption, hashtags and a sound suggestion. You then make the slides yourself, in photo mode, with the steps above. The slideshow docs cover what the analysis reads and what it doesn't, and how to recreate a viral TikTok slideshow walks through the whole process.

If photo mode isn't showing

A few things to check, in order:

• Update the app. Photo mode has been around since 2022, but button labels and placement change between versions, and an old build may show a different flow.
• Look in the right place. In TikTok's current guide, Photo is chosen on the creation screen after Add post (+), before Upload. Some guides describe a switch between photo and video after you've selected images instead; if you see one, choose the photo option to keep the post swipeable.
• Check whether it's your account. TikTok rolls features out by region and account, and doesn't document every case. If photo mode still isn't there after an update, it may not be on your account yet.

We couldn't confirm every variation of these screens in TikTok's documentation, so treat them as places to look, not as exact menus.