Polaroid effect and scrapbook Instagram carousel: the photo album look

To get a Polaroid effect and a scrapbook look on an Instagram carousel, you need five ingredients: a Polaroid frame around the photos, a slight tilt, a piece of tape to "stick" them down, handwriting to annotate them and a background that suggests paper. Put together on a carousel, they give the feeling of leafing through an album. All of this can be composed in SwipeAtelier, for free and with no account, using your own photos.

The Polaroid frame: the foundation of the effect

A Polaroid is recognizable by its light border, wider at the bottom, where people used to write a date or a name. In the tool, it's a photo frame in its own right: select a photo, then choose the Polaroid frame.

Three settings make the effect believable:

• A crop close to square. Instant prints are almost square. Crop the photo within its frame to center the subject, even if it means sacrificing the edges.
• A shadow. It lifts the print off the background and makes it look like an object resting on the page. Without a shadow, the frame looks like a plain border.
• A modest size. A Polaroid that fills the whole slide loses its charm. Leave some background visible around it: that's the album page.

For a vintage touch, apply the Sepia or Soft filter, or lower the saturation and contrast slightly. Apply the same treatment to every photo, so the series looks as if it came out of the same camera.

Tilted photos: the "Scattered" templates

In a handmade album, nothing is perfectly straight. The tilt is what turns a grid into a scrapbook.

The quickest way is to start from the "Scattered" template family: the photos are already arranged at an angle, as if pinned to a corkboard, and the layout is calculated for your format and number of slides. All that's left is to place your photos, then adjust. The other families are presented on the carousel templates page.

To set the tilt by hand, rotate each photo. On mobile, the two-finger gesture lets you rotate and resize at the same time.

A few guidelines for a mess that works:

• Small, varied angles. A few degrees one way, a few degrees the other. Photos that all lean the same way look as if they're sliding; angles that are too steep get in the way of reading.
• Light overlaps. One corner crossing over the neighboring photo is enough. Use the front/back order to decide which photo covers the other, and take care not to hide any faces.
• A straight photo now and then. It rests the eye and sets off the others.

Tape, handwriting and stickers

These are the details that say "scrapbook." They're quick to add, and quick to overdo.

Tape. The tool's shapes include a piece of tape. Place one on the top edge of a photo, or two on opposite corners, as if you had just stuck it to the page. Keep the same style of tape across the whole carousel.

Handwriting. The Caveat font imitates writing in pen. It belongs in the bottom strip of the Polaroid (a place, a date, a name) or in the margin, next to a photo. Keep annotations short and the size comfortable: handwriting is harder to read when small. For a bolder headline, Pacifico offers a thicker stroke. The rules of readability are covered in the article on text on an Instagram carousel.

Stickers and shapes. A heart, a star, an arrow pointing to a detail, a few emoji stickers: they play the part of sticker dots and rubber stamps. Allow one or two decorative elements per slide, no more.

If an element points to nothing and fills no gap, remove it.

Creating a paper background with a color or a gradient

The tool doesn't offer textures: the background is a solid color or a gradient. That's enough to suggest an album page, provided you choose the shade well.

• Kraft paper: a light, slightly warm brown.
• Old album page: a cream or ivory, rather than a pure white that would make the Polaroid borders disappear.
• Black album: a charcoal, against which the light frames stand out clearly. In that case, write in white or cream.
• Pastel notebook: a dusty pink, a sage green, a blue-gray.

A subtle gradient between two very close shades gives the whole thing a little depth and avoids an overly flat color. Because the background runs across the entire carousel, a horizontal gradient shifts from slide to slide: the page looks continuous as you swipe.

Elements that straddle two slides

This is where the carousel has the edge over a single image. In the tool, all the slides are composed on a single canvas, then cut on export with edges that line up exactly. A Polaroid placed on the boundary between two slides therefore appears half on one and half on the next.

In the feed, the reader sees a print cut off at the right edge of the image, swipes to see the rest, and the photo comes back together during the swipe. The album becomes one long page to travel across.

For the effect to work:

1. Let secondary elements straddle the cut: a scene-setting Polaroid, a piece of tape, an arrow, an annotation.
2. Don't cut through a face or an important word. Each slide should still look good on its own.
3. Spread the overlaps out: one per cut is enough to invite the next swipe.
4. Check the result in the preview, which swipes through the carousel as Instagram does.

Building the scrapbook Instagram carousel, step by step

1. Choose the format (4:5 or 3:4 portrait leaves enough height to stack two or three prints) and the number of slides.
2. Select a template from the "Scattered" family.
3. Set the background color or gradient.
4. Import your photos and place them in the frames.
5. Apply the Polaroid frame and the shadow, then the same filter to every photo.
6. Adjust the tilts and move a few elements onto the cuts.
7. Add tape, annotations in Caveat and stickers.
8. Check the preview, then export.

This style is especially well suited to memories: a birthday, the year gone by, a vacation. For the story of a trip, see the method for a photo dump and travel journal. The same Polaroid frames and tape also work in 9:16 with the Instagram story maker, for a series of stories in the same style. If you'd like to gather several prints on a single image rather than across a carousel, the photo collage for Instagram page and these collage layout ideas suggest other arrangements.