How to Make Instagram Reels with Still Images

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Video Transcription

Hey everyone, it’s Kelli here with She Learns Video, and today I am going to show you how to create Instagram Reels utilizing your photographs. So, this is super helpful if you’re a photographer or if you’re someone in the creative industry and you have still images that you want to share utilizing this new tool that Instagram has Instagram Reels.

So, how I have done it is I’ve been utilizing Canva, and I go in here and I click on social media and then I click to the Instagram story option. From here you will see they have lots of different templates for creating stories, so different tools that you might want to utilize as far as different layouts and ways to get creative.

The way I like to do it is to find something that has a lot of photograph availability, like space for you to drop images. This one is great, pretty minimal, and one that I like using. So, you’ll just click on whatever of these templates works best for you and then you can go ahead and drop in your own images.

So, what I’ve done is I’ve uploaded photographs to Canva here, and these are the images I’m going to use. You can see I’ve done some other sessions in the past, but I just try to drop some of my favorite images into Canva, and then they’re ready to create my reel.

So, we will pop these images in here and you can resize based on what fits best. I’m actually going to save that one for a different spot. Let’s do this one here.

Okay, so, once you have images on your page, you can click animate and this will give you some different options for how you want the images to display when the reel is playing back. These are all whatever fits your brand and fits the style that you’re going for so we’ll just choose this one, and then you can also choose the time that it will play when you export the video. I have been doing five seconds for each little clip, for each little screen and then I will just go through and duplicate these.

You could also go back up to templates and perhaps change one of these pages around. Maybe if you want to do three images on one and one on this last one, you could do that. And with the copy sometimes I’ll write in here, contact me to book your session or any kind of call to action that I want to put. But for now we’ll just leave it plain and you can utilize that however you see fit.

Then I would just drop in the image that I want to use. If I did want to, let’s say, make that a little bit thinner and drag my image over a little bit I could. Perfect. Let’s see, here we will drop in a couple of other photographs and get them just how you want them to look. Okay.

Then you just need to go through and make sure each page has the animation set. So, I think we’ve decided pan this one. Yep. This pan, and then we’ll do the same thing for this one. Perfect.

And the last couple of things here, you can see it’s green and this beige color, and ideally these would be more of your brand colors. So here in Canva, I have my brand colors saved. If you don’t, you can use this tool here to create any color you want, but we’ll drop in a few different brand colors to kind of keep it consistent and looking pretty.

So, now that I have my three pages and they are all set to five seconds, what my goal is for this is to make it a 15 second reel on Instagram. Once you have it all ready to go, you will go to, and you can see that total number here is 15 seconds. If you do want to add more images and make a 30 second reel, you could do that. And those are just nice tools to be able to kind of evaluate. If you wanted to do four slides, you would just make sure that the time here on each slide is set so that the total time equals the length of the full Instagram Reel that you want to create.

From here, you can click download, and then I just download the MP4 video and I choose all of the pages just as it says. And then I hit download. And once this is finished, it will be in my downloads. And then I will Airdrop it over to my phone. Once I have it on my phone, then it’s pretty easy to upload to Instagram and I will show you how I do that and how I get everything set up on Instagram and we’ll go from there.

Now that you have Airdropped or Dropbox, the reel video we created in Canva to your phone, you will go to your profile and up in the top right-hand corner, you will see the plus sign. You’ll click on that. And then you’re going to want to select reel. And from here on the bottom left, you will see the option to go into your videos. And then you can select the reel that we created in Canva. So for us, that’s going to be this video right here, and then you will see it play and it is 15 seconds long. And then the top right-hand corner you’ll select add.

From there, you can hit this edit button in the bottom right-hand corner. And then here, you’ll see the video again. And if you want to add any text, you can do that. Or if you want to add anything additional, you can do that, as well, here. You can also add in music on this previous screen. Right now, Instagram is mad at me, so it’s not letting me add any music, but you should be able to do that depending on your account.

And then you’ll go to this bottom right-hand corner where it says share to. And then from here, you’re going to be able to write your caption and add any hashtags that you would like to. You’ll also see this option for profile to show on your profile grid. I do encourage you to add it to your profile grid, which is just your normal Instagram feed, because it will get a lot more views that way.

So, you do have an option, if you click here on the show on profile grid, you can turn that off and on, but again, I encourage you to turn it on if it works for you. And then I always like to update my cover photo. Here next to the caption, you’ll see, cover, click that. And then you can scroll throughout your reel and decide if you want to select a still image from the reel to choose. Or you can go down here to add from camera roll, hit the plus sign, and then I’m just going to select, I always favorite the images that I want to add, and I’ll add the image of the little girl who is featured in this reel. So, that way my profile looks consistent. My feed looks consistent and everything looks its best when I am adding it to Instagram.

I hope that’s helpful. If you have any questions, definitely let us know. Thank you so much for tuning in and watching this video. If you liked this one, definitely subscribe and you can always check us out over at shelearnsvideo.com for more information on creating videos and adding video to your photography business.

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