YouTube has introduced carousel photo posts to its Shorts feed, allowing creators to upload up to 10 images in a single post that viewers can swipe through, with the option to add text to each image and background music of up to 15 seconds, bringing a format long popular on Instagram and TikTok directly into the Shorts experience.
For music, creators can choose from YouTube’s licensed music catalogue, the YouTube Audio Library, and Dream Track where the feature is available, giving a range of options that cover both mainstream licensed tracks and royalty-free alternatives depending on the type of content being produced. YouTube has described the update as a way to give creators a more effective means of sharing visual stories through the Shorts feed, while simultaneously giving musicians and artists better opportunities for discovery as their tracks appear alongside photo content in a format that tends to generate strong engagement on competing platforms.
The update positions YouTube Shorts more directly alongside Instagram Reels and TikTok, both of which have built significant creator and user bases around image-based carousel and photo post formats as alternatives to short-form video. Instagram has offered carousel posts with music for several years, and TikTok introduced photo posts as an alternative format to its signature short videos, with both platforms finding that static image content with audio performs particularly well for promotional material, before-and-after comparisons, travel documentation, and lifestyle content that does not require motion to communicate effectively. According to YouTube, the new feature will be especially useful for creators and artists who share content across multiple platforms simultaneously, as it allows them to repurpose familiar formats across their entire social media presence without having to produce separate video content exclusively for Shorts.
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