Make a social media post or carousel

How Photo Date Rescue builds a multi-page carousel out of your own photos, what comes out of it, and the part of the job it does not do at all — posting.

Applies to: Photo Date Rescue for Windows, version 3.0.4. Last verified: 29 July 2026. Every statement on this page was checked against the shipping 3.0.4 build. If you are on an older or newer version, the behavior may differ — check What’s new for changes.

This page is the reference we cite from our comparison table. Each capability below has its own permanent link, so a claim about PDR can always be traced to the paragraph that supports it. Where the answer is “no” or “only partly”, this page says so in the same words the comparison uses.

The one thing to understand first

PDR builds the carousel as one wide picture, then cuts it up. Almost every other tool gives you a stack of separate pages and asks you to make them look like a set. PDR gives you a single canvas 1080 pixels wide per page — so a four-page carousel is one design 4320 pixels across — with faint gold lines showing where the cuts will fall. You compose across the whole thing, and the slides are sliced out at the end.

That one decision explains both what PDR is unusually good at here and what it cannot do. A background, a gradient, a sweep of color or a photo that runs from page two into page three is not a feature you switch on; it is simply what happens, because in the design there is no boundary there at all. The seamless swipe that other tools sell as a template is the default state of the canvas.

The cost is rigidity. The canvas is always 1080×1350 per page — Instagram’s 4:5 portrait — and always between two and ten pages. There is no square carousel, no story-shaped carousel and no landscape one, and Instagram itself will accept twenty images where PDR stops at ten. Pages are added and removed at the end of the run, and there is no way to duplicate a page or move page four to the front.

And PDR does not post anything. There is no connected account, no scheduler, no publish button and no direct upload to any network. What you get is a folder of correctly sized, correctly ordered image files, which you then post yourself. That is a genuine gap against every other tool on the comparison and it is not going to be dressed up here.

On the free trial you can save five carousels for the lifetime of the trial. That counter is separate from the five collages, so it is five of each rather than five between them, and nothing about the editor is reduced inside those five.

At a glance

Capability	In 3.0.4
Create, add, delete and reorder the pages	Add and remove at the end. No duplicate, no reorder.
Produce correctly sized slides in unambiguous order	Order is exact. Shape is locked to 4:5.
Keep the design continuous across page boundaries	Yes — it is one canvas, so the seam is free.
Save, reopen, revise and duplicate the project	Yes — reopens as a carousel, page count intact.
Keep versions of a post and go back to an earlier one	No. One saved state; saving replaces it. Templates only.
Import, replace, crop and reposition your own photos	Yes — straight from your library, no upload.
Be clear about where photos and drafts are stored	Yes — on your machine. No account, no upload.
Hand the finished set to the destination	Files only. No posting, no scheduling. Windows.
Design one wide strip and have it cut into numbered, upload-ready slides	Yes. The whole set is produced at once, never one slide.
Build it from family photos with nothing uploaded and no draft left on a service	Yes. Nothing is hosted, so nothing follows you either.
Show where the platform’s own buttons will cover the design, without those guides reaching the file	Yes, for the common case. One platform, no true preview.
Take the same post to another platform’s size without rebuilding it	Only partly. Single posts rescale; a carousel cannot change shape.

Controlling the pages

A strip along the bottom of the editor shows the run as PAGE 1, PAGE 2, PAGE 3 and so on. These are deliberately plain labels rather than thumbnails of each page: at strip size a render of a page is too small to read, and the thing you need to know while composing is which page you are looking at. Clicking one jumps the view to that page. A plus at the end adds a page; a small cross on a page removes one. The count is held between two and ten, and the plus grays out with a note when you reach the maximum.

What is missing is the middle of the criterion. There is no way to duplicate a page, and no way to reorder the pages — you cannot drag page four to the front, and the strip is a navigator rather than a sequence editor. Pages are added and removed at the end of the run, and when the count changes every photo and every piece of text is rescaled so that what you have already placed stays exactly where it was on screen. If the order is wrong, you move the content rather than the pages.

What comes out, and in what order

This is the part PDR does most precisely, so it is worth being specific. Saving a carousel writes a dated folder into your library — PDR Captures, the month, then Carousel_ and a timestamp — containing:

One file per page, named slide_01.jpg, slide_02.jpg and so on, zero-padded so they sort correctly in any file browser on any system. There is no ambiguity about which page goes first.
Each slide at exactly 1080×1350 pixels, resized down from the real captured canvas. On a high-DPI screen the capture happens at your display’s true device resolution and is then supersampled down, so the slides are sharper rather than merely correct.
The joined wide design as well, so you keep the whole picture as one image, not only the pieces.

All of it is then indexed into your library like any other photo and filed into the carousel’s own album, whose cover is set to page one rather than the wide overview — a wide image cropped into a square album tile reads as nonsense. Saving again after an edit replaces the previous save, its slides and its album, rather than stacking a second near-identical copy; there is a separate “save as new carousel” when you want to keep both.

The limit is the shape. Every slide is 1080×1350 whatever you intended, because the carousel canvas has one size. If you want a square carousel, a story-shaped one or a landscape one, PDR will not make it. Single, non-carousel collages are a different matter — those can target the full range of social and print sizes, and Photo collages covers them.

Designing across the page boundaries

The row PDR wins, and it wins it by construction rather than by feature. Because the carousel is one continuous canvas, anything you put on it crosses the page boundaries for free: a photo can straddle the cut between pages two and three, a background gradient can run the whole width, and a headline can begin on one page and finish on the next. You are not lining up separate pages and hoping the seam works — there is no seam in the design, only marks showing where it will be cut.

Those marks are configurable. By default the boundaries are drawn as gold divider lines. Turn on page outlines instead and each page gets a frame you can set the color and thickness of, drawn inside the page edge so it never spills past the canvas.

There is also an Instagram safe zone: a faint dashed inset on each page marking where Instagram’s own interface — the username strip, the caption and call-to-action, the rounded corners — will sit on top of your image. Dragging a photo snaps to it. It is drawn in the editor only and is switched off during the export render, so it can never bake itself into a saved slide.

Saving, reopening and revising

A carousel is the same kind of reopenable project as a collage, and everything on the Photo collages page applies here: it saves itself as you work, a chip beside the title reads Saving and then All changes saved, and the project is stored twice — a working copy in the application’s own data folder so it opens with the library drive unplugged, and a copy on the library drive itself so it survives a reinstall.

The carousel-specific part is that the project records that it is a carousel and how many pages it had, so reopening puts you back into carousel mode at the right page count with the wide canvas intact rather than dropping you into a single square design. A carousel can be saved as a template to start future ones from, and deleting one sends it to a recycle bin you can restore from.

The one thing the criterion asks for that is not here is resizing: a finished carousel cannot be converted to a different aspect ratio, because there is only one carousel shape. Leaving carousel mode reshapes the design to a single page rather than re-flowing it.

Keeping earlier versions of a post

No, and here is what there is instead. A post is one saved state. The autosave that makes the editor so forgiving is the same thing that costs you the history: every save writes over the same project record, so the design as it stood a minute ago is not kept anywhere on disk. There is no version list, no revision history, nothing to open, compare or roll back to, and no way to see what the post looked like yesterday. Undo steps back through the changes you have made in the session you are in — up to sixty of them — and reopening a project clears that stack. The chevron beside the Save button offers Save as new carousel, but that is about the finished files: it keeps a second copy of the exported slides in your library rather than branching the project you are editing. If you want a design you can go back to, you have to take that snapshot yourself, deliberately, before you change anything — and the way to do it is “Save as template”.

To do it

Before a round of changes you might regret, use Save as template and name it so you will recognize it later — the date, or “before the rewrite”. It is written as a separate, frozen record, not a copy of the project.
Carry on editing the post. Nothing you do to it afterwards touches the template.
To get the earlier design back, open that template from the welcome screen. A carousel template reopens in carousel mode at the page count it had, and the template itself stays pristine.
Take another snapshot before the next big change. There is no automatic numbering, so your own names are the only thing standing in for version numbers.

Limitations

Saving replaces rather than accumulates. One project, one record, one state. Nothing is written aside first, so there is no earlier copy to be found even by digging in the folders the project is stored in — and because the library-drive copy is a mirror of the same record, the second copy described under saving, reopening and revising is protection against a lost drive, not against a change you regret.
“Save as new carousel” copies the output, not the project. It appears only after you have saved once, and what it does is leave the previously saved slides and their album alone while writing a fresh set beside them. Both sets of files then exist, but you are still editing a single project, and Update from that point tracks the new set.
Templates are a workaround, not a history. They sit on the Templates tab as designs to start from, not as versions of a post; nothing lists them against the post they came from, nothing dates them for you as revisions, and you only have one if you remembered to make it at the time.
Reopening a snapshot can overwrite the design made from it. Every design started from the same template deliberately converges onto a single project card, so that reopening a template does not litter the gallery with near-identical copies. The template is never overwritten; the design made from it is continued rather than duplicated.
Updating a carousel destroys the previous export. Re-saving deletes the earlier slides, the wide image, the album they were filed in and the folder that held them, outright, rather than sending them to a recycle bin. So the superseded set is not sitting somewhere waiting to be recovered either.
The recycle bin restores the project, not a past state. Deleting a carousel is a soft delete you can undo, and that is genuinely useful — but what comes back is the last saved state, because the flag that marks it deleted lives on that same single record.
Version numbers in names no longer do anything. Earlier releases numbered designs v2, v3 and so on inside the name. 3.0.4 dropped that: the naming dialogue has no version field and a version is ignored when the name is assembled, so old names keep the number they already had and new ones cannot be given one.

Getting your own photos in and moving them around

The photos come from the library the application already holds, so there is no upload, no import step and no size or format gate to pass. You select them and open the editor.

Across the wide canvas each photo can be dragged anywhere, resized and cropped by its handles, rotated, flipped, layered above or below its neighbors and locked in place, and Replace photo swaps a different picture into the same box at the same size without disturbing the layout — the control that matters most when you are four pages in and the second photo is wrong. Tone, background removal, text and effects all work here exactly as they do in a single collage.

Because there is one canvas rather than a stack of pages, moving a photo from page one to page three is a drag, not a cut and paste between documents.

Where the photos and the draft actually live

On your machine. There is no account, no sign-in and no upload; the editor runs locally, the background remover runs on your device rather than calling a service, and both the project file and the exported slides are written to your own disk. Nothing is hosted, so there is no draft sitting on a server, nothing retained after you delete, and no copy to ask anybody to remove.

This is the clearest trade on the whole comparison. Every other tool here keeps your drafts and your uploads on its own infrastructure, which is exactly what buys them the publishing button PDR does not have.

Getting it onto the platform, and who can use it

PDR does not post. No connected accounts, no scheduling, no publish button, no direct upload to Instagram or anywhere else. The handoff is the folder of slides: you open it, and you upload slide_01 through slide_10 in that order yourself. The naming makes the order impossible to get wrong, and the sizes are already correct, so the upload is mechanical — but it is your job, and on a phone it means getting the files to the phone first, which Share is candid about.

Windows only. No macOS, Linux, web or mobile build. Since posting to Instagram is easiest from a phone and the design tool is on a PC, that split is a real part of the workflow rather than a footnote.

On assistive technology we record unknown rather than claiming a pass. The editor is a direct-manipulation canvas — photos positioned and cropped by dragging handles — and while the structural operations have keyboard shortcuts, whether a carousel can actually be completed by keyboard and screen reader is a question only testing answers, and we have not run that test.

Designing one wide strip and having it cut into slides

Yes. You design across one continuous wide canvas rather than a stack of separate pages, so a background, a line of type or a photograph can run across the joins as a single piece instead of being lined up in three parts and hoped over. On saving, PDR cuts that design into exactly the right number of slides at exactly the right size, and numbers them in order, left to right, so the set is ready to upload in that order without you working out which one goes first. Designing across the page boundaries covers the composing side of this, and what comes out, and in what order covers the files themselves.

To do it

Choose how many pages the run is. The wide canvas is sized to match, with the cut lines marked on it.
Compose across the whole width, deliberately letting backgrounds and photographs cross the marks where you want continuity.
Save. The whole set is cut, numbered and filed into your library, alongside the joined wide design.
Open the folder and upload the slides in their numbered order.

Limitations

Saving produces the whole set, never one slide. There is no re-export of a single page, so correcting one thing means saving the set again and re-uploading all of it.
The slide names are generated and cannot be chosen. They are built to sort correctly rather than to describe anything, and there is no naming option.
Renaming the files afterwards breaks the link back to the set inside PDR. The pictures themselves are unaffected and will still upload perfectly well — it is PDR’s own record of which slides belong to which carousel that is lost.

Building it from family photos with nothing uploaded

Yes. The whole thing is built on your own machine. The photographs come from your own library rather than being uploaded to a design service, the typefaces ship with PDR rather than being fetched as you type, and there is nothing to sign up for and no account to create. A work in progress is saved on your own computer, which means an abandoned draft of a family post — the one with the children in it that you decided not to publish after all — is not sitting on anybody’s server waiting to be part of a breach or a change of terms. Where the photos and the draft actually live covers the same ground from the storage side.

To do it

Select the photographs from your library and open them in the editor. There is no upload step to wait for.
Build the post. Disconnect from the internet first if you want to prove the point to yourself; everything, including the background remover, still works.
Save. The slides are written to your own disk and indexed into your own library.

Limitations

Nothing is hosted, so nothing follows you. There is no account pulling a draft down onto a second computer — a post started on one machine is not waiting for you on another unless you carry the library itself across. See surviving a change of drive or computer for how that move works.
There is nothing to share by link. A draft cannot be sent to somebody for comment, because there is no server to put it on.

Seeing where the platform’s own buttons will cover the design

Yes. A safe-zone overlay marks where a platform’s own interface — the name strip along the top, the caption and call-to-action along the bottom, the rounded corners — will sit over your image once it is posted. It is drawn as a faint inset on each page, and dragging a photo snaps to it, so keeping faces and words clear of the furniture is a matter of working inside the guide rather than guessing. The guides live in the editor only: the finished file contains your design and nothing else, so an overlay left switched on can never bake itself into a slide.

To do it

Switch the safe zone on before you place anything important.
Keep faces, headlines and anything that must be read inside the inset. Photos snap to it as you drag.
Leave it switched on and save. Check a saved slide if you want to confirm for yourself that the guide is not in it.

Limitations

The safe zone is drawn from published dimensions, not from the platform itself. If a platform moves its own interface without notice, the guide is out of date until we update it.
It is offered for the common case rather than for every destination. A less common platform has no guide of its own, so there you are back to leaving a generous margin by eye.
There is no preview of the post as the platform will actually show it. Nothing renders your design inside a mock-up of the app. The guide is the closest you get to seeing it in place.

Taking the same post to another platform’s size

Only partly, and it depends on which of the two things you built. A single-page post can be moved to a different platform’s proportions using the same resize that collages use: everything on the canvas is repositioned and rescaled rather than rebuilt. A multi-page carousel cannot be reshaped at all — the carousel canvas has one shape, so there is no square, story or landscape version of a carousel to convert to, and leaving carousel mode reshapes the design to a single page instead of re-flowing it. See what comes out and saving, reopening and revising.

To do it

For a single-page post, open the canvas size controls and choose the target platform’s preset.
Confirm. Everything is repositioned and rescaled to the new proportions at once.
Read the result properly, particularly the text, before you save it.
If it is wrong, undo with Ctrl+Z rather than resizing back.

Limitations

It rescales, it does not reflow. Text is scaled rather than re-wrapped to the new width, and precisely placed elements can end up overlapping or pushed off the edge. The full list is on the collages page, and it applies here unchanged.
A carousel has no other shape to go to. Every slide is the same portrait size whatever the destination, so a carousel intended for a square feed is a rebuild rather than a resize.
Nothing redistributes content across a different number of slides. A change of shape can easily change how many slides the same material needs, and moving that material between pages is manual work you do yourself.

Known gaps in 3.0.4

Collected in one place, so you do not have to read the whole page to find them.

No posting, no scheduling and no connected accounts — you upload the slides yourself.
Carousel slides are always 1080×1350. No square, story or landscape carousel.
Two to ten pages. Instagram itself accepts twenty.
No way to duplicate a page, and no way to reorder pages.
A finished carousel cannot be converted to a different aspect ratio.
No version history. Saving replaces the one saved state, and there is nothing to roll back to once you close the editor.
If the canvas capture fails, the save falls back to redrawing the design, and that redraw predates several of the newer background effects — so a background can come out different from what the editor showed, with only a log entry to say so.
If an individual slide fails to render, the save continues with the rest. The button reports how many slides were saved, but nothing states that pages were dropped.
Windows only — no macOS, Linux, web or mobile version.
Keyboard-only and screen-reader operation of the editor are untested.
On the free trial, five carousels for the lifetime of the trial.

How to check any of this yourself

The slide order and size: save a four-page carousel, then open the Carousel_ folder in your library. Four files named slide_01 to slide_04, each 1080×1350, plus the wide design.
That the seam is genuinely free: drag one photo so it sits across the gold line between two pages, save, and open the two slides side by side. The photo continues.
The safe zone does not bake in: leave the dashed inset switched on, save, and look at a slide. It is not there.
The page cap: keep clicking the plus. It stops at ten and the tooltip says so.
That there is no reorder: look for any way to drag a page in the strip, or any duplicate-page control. There is a plus, a cross and a jump-to-page.
That it reopens as a carousel: build five pages, quit PDR entirely, reopen the project. Five pages, wide canvas, everything where you left it.
That there is no version history: save a carousel, change it obviously, save again, then look for any history, versions or revisions control on the project card, in the editor and on the welcome screen. There is rename, delete and open — and only the current design behind them.
That nothing is uploaded: disconnect from the internet completely and build and save a carousel. It all works.
That there is no publish route: look through the editor for a post, publish, schedule or connect-account control. There is Save, and there is the folder.

If something on this page does not match what your copy of PDR does, that is a defect in one of the two and we want to know which. Tell us on the support page.

Related: the step-by-step guide to social media posts walks through making one rather than describing what is possible. Photo collages covers single-page designs and the full range of print and social sizes, and Share covers getting the finished files off the PC.