How to Schedule Instagram Carousels with AI (Plus Facebook, LinkedIn and Threads)

What you need

An MCP Ads account with the social profiles you want to post to connected in the dashboard: a Facebook Page, an Instagram professional account (connected through its own Instagram login or through the Facebook Page it is linked to), LinkedIn (your profile or a company page you administer), and Threads. Then add the MCP Ads connector to Claude, ChatGPT or another MCP client. The Instagram MCP page and the publishing docs cover the connections.

Scheduled posts live on the content calendar in the MCP Ads dashboard. The calendar publishes each post when its time comes, so your computer and the chat do not need to be open. You can see, reschedule or cancel anything there, or ask the assistant.

Carousel limits on each platform

A carousel is one post with several media items. The content calendar takes them as an ordered list and checks the set against the platform's limits before it is scheduled, so a carousel that would fail is refused with a reason when you schedule it, not at publish time.

Step 1: prepare the slides

Design once for the strictest platform. Instagram accepts JPEG images with an aspect ratio between 4:5 (portrait) and 1.91:1 (landscape), up to 8 MB each, and shows every slide in a carousel at the same ratio. A 4:5 portrait at 1080x1350 pixels uses the most screen space in the feed and is accepted by the other platforms too.

• Export as JPEG, not PNG, for Instagram. A PNG that looks fine on your screen is the most common reason an Instagram image is refused.
• Name files in order (01-hook.jpg, 02-problem.jpg ...). It makes the prompt unambiguous.
• Put the hook on slide one and a clear call to action on the last slide; the caption carries the link, since links in Instagram captions are not clickable.
• For LinkedIn, consider exporting the same slides as a single PDF: it posts as a document carousel that people swipe through, and the first page acts as the cover.

Step 2: get the images to the assistant

The calendar publishes from public image URLs, because Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and Threads fetch the media themselves at publish time. There are two easy ways to provide them:

• Links you already have: images in a CDN, your website's media library, or a public cloud folder link that serves the file directly. Paste them into the prompt in order. MCP Ads can also copy an image from a public link into its own storage, so the post does not break if the original link moves.
• Files on your computer: in clients that support it, MCP Ads shows an upload box in the chat. Drop the images in, and the assistant gets a permanent public URL for each.
• Images generated in the chat: if you create the slides with MCP Ads' image tools, they already have URLs the calendar can use.

Step 3: schedule the carousel

Give the assistant the platform, the images in order, the caption, and the date and time in your local clock with a timezone. Times are written as "YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM", and the timezone is an IANA name such as Europe/London, America/New_York or Asia/Singapore. If you leave the timezone out, the workspace's timezone setting is used, which is fine if you set it once in the dashboard. The assistant can also pass a full timestamp with an offset, but local time plus a timezone name is easier to read back and survives daylight saving changes correctly.

Schedule an Instagram carousel for Tuesday October 28 at 09:00 America/New_York with these 6 images, in this order:
1. https://cdn.example.com/oct/01-hook.jpg
2. https://cdn.example.com/oct/02-mistake.jpg
3. https://cdn.example.com/oct/03-fix.jpg
4. https://cdn.example.com/oct/04-example.jpg
5. https://cdn.example.com/oct/05-result.jpg
6. https://cdn.example.com/oct/06-cta.jpg
Caption: write it from the notes below, under 150 words, 3-5 hashtags at the end, link in bio CTA.
[notes]

Step 4: the same carousel on Facebook, LinkedIn and Threads

Each platform gets its own scheduled post, which is useful: the caption should differ anyway. LinkedIn readers expect a longer, more professional post and a link; Threads has a 500-character limit; Facebook can carry a link in the text. Ask for all four in one request and have the assistant adapt the caption to each.

Schedule the same 6 slides on:
- Facebook Page "Acme Studio", same day at 12:00
- LinkedIn as the Acme Studio company page, Wednesday at 08:30, caption rewritten for LinkedIn with the link https://example.com/guide at the end
- Threads, Tuesday at 18:00, caption under 450 characters
All times America/New_York. Show me each caption before scheduling.

• Facebook carousels take photos only. If the Instagram version includes a video slide, ask for a photo-only version for Facebook.
• On LinkedIn the post goes to your personal profile unless you name a company page you administer.
• Asking to see captions first costs one extra message and saves editing a scheduled post later.

Step 5: a week of carousels in one request

Each time you give becomes its own scheduled post, so a series is one prompt. A week of educational carousels, a launch countdown, or the same evergreen carousel reposted monthly all work the same way.

Here are 5 carousels (folders 1-5, images numbered in order). Schedule one each weekday next week on Instagram at 08:00 Europe/London, and on LinkedIn as the company page at 09:30. Write captions from the notes in each folder. Before scheduling, give me a table: day, platform, time, number of slides, first line of caption.

Step 6: check, move or cancel what is queued

Ask for the queue at any time. The listing shows calendar posts with their local time and their time in UTC, plus posts published recently, and posts you scheduled natively on Facebook, so nothing is double-booked.

List everything scheduled for the next 14 days across Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and Threads, in New York time, grouped by day. Flag any day with more than two posts on the same platform.

• Cancel from the chat: "Cancel the Threads post on Tuesday at 18:00."
• Move a post on the content calendar in the dashboard, or ask the assistant to cancel it and schedule it again at the new time.
• If a platform rejects a post at publish time, for example because an image link stopped working, the calendar marks it as failed with the reason, so check the list after a busy week.

Tips that save rework

A few habits make AI-scheduled carousels as reliable as hand-scheduled ones:

• Always name the timezone in the prompt when you work with clients or audiences in other countries. "9am" without one is the most common scheduling mistake.
• Keep slide order in filenames and repeat "in this order". Assistants follow a numbered list reliably.
• Make media links permanent. A signed or expiring link that works today may fail when the post publishes next week; copy it into MCP Ads storage instead.
• Write the caption last. Once the slides exist, ask the assistant to read them back to you as a summary and write the caption from that, so the post and the slides agree.
• For agencies: posts on the calendar belong to a client in your workspace, so say which client a carousel is for when you manage several.