Best Claude Code skills for Instagram carousels

Slide one sets everything

The first slide is not just the cover — it is the style guide for the rest of the set. Everything you want repeated has to be visible in it: the backdrop colour, the light, the subject, the way the subject is styled. We used a grooming salon as the example, because a carousel for a local business is the case where the slides most obviously have to match.

Slides two and three, from the same reference

The next two runs each described a different moment — the groom in progress, then the dog settled afterwards — and passed slide one back as a reference image. Nothing in the later prompts re-described the dog. The reference carried it.

What the reference held, and what it did not

It held more than we expected. The dog is recognisably the same animal across all three slides — the same coat colour, the same face, the same ear shape — and the backdrop is the same shade of sage in each. The lighting matches. None of that was re-described in the second and third prompts; it came from the reference alone, which is the whole reason to work this way rather than re-typing a description and hoping.

This is worth knowing before you commission ten slides rather than three. A reference image transfers identity, palette, and lighting; it does not transfer composition. If the set needs the subject at a consistent size, say so in words on every slide — "the dog fills roughly the lower half of the frame" — instead of assuming the reference will carry it. And check the set as a set, at thumbnail size, in order, before you write a single caption.

The ratio, and the constraint that comes with it

Instagram added native support for 3:4 photos in May 2025, and 3:4 is one of the ratios the catalog offers — so generate at 3:4 and there is nothing to crop. Our slides came back at 2016 by 2688, which is exactly that shape. The older advice to render 4:5 and trim is out of date, and 4:5 is not one of the offered ratios anyway; the full list is 1:1, 3:4, 4:3, 16:9, 9:16, 3:2, 2:3, and 21:9.

The real constraint is a different one: every slide in a carousel has to share the same aspect ratio, and the first slide sets it for the whole post. So pick the ratio before you generate slide one, not after. If a later slide comes back framed too tight or too loose, a small crop is free local work the agent can do in the same session — and cropping to match the set is cheaper than regenerating the slide.

What a set actually costs

Cheaper models in the catalog start at $0.10 per run, so an exploration pass to settle the look before committing to a full set costs even less; the four-model comparison shows what each one does with the same brief. Whichever you pick, keep the winning slide one — it is the reference for every future post in the same style, not just this carousel.

Running it from Claude Code

Claude Code has no image model of its own; the Skill installed with the CLI adds the image generation capability to the same session, and the cropping is ordinary local file work it can do for nothing. Every run is priced before it starts, and an empty wallet stops the job before anything is charged. Adding type is the one step to keep out of the model's hands — image models spell badly, which is why the prompts above ask for empty space instead of a headline.

Set it up once

npm install --global @actionway/cli@latest
actionway init
mkdir -p "$HOME/.claude/skills"
cp -R "$HOME/.actionway/skill/actionway" "$HOME/.claude/skills/actionway"

You need Node.js 20 or newer and an Actionway account. Codex users copy the same folder into ~/.codex/skills/actionway instead, and both routes reach the same catalog and the same wallet — the get started page lists the steps per client side by side.