If posting to YouTube Shorts as part of your artist’s marketing strategy, you know that traditionally, it doesn’t have the same photo posting feature as Instagram and TikTok do, with Carousels and Photo Mode, respectively – as can be useful towards keeping up posting frequency while not always having to upload videos.
But that’s changing now: according to a YouTube Help forum post, the platform has been testing image posts in the Shorts feed for a few months, and some users have already reported noticing them in their feeds. The newest update will allow users to add up to 15 seconds of music to their image posts, plus text overlays directly onto individual images within a carousel.
Music can be added from three sources: YouTube’s library of licensed and popular music, the YouTube Audio Library (royalty-free tracks), and Dream Track (its tool for generating custom soundtracks with the help of AI). The Dream Track option is only available for certain markets though, which have not been made public.
While these posts may appear on the Shorts feed, inside YouTube Studio you will still find them under the ‘Posts’ tab, rather than the ‘Shorts’ tab. Only image posts that are shown to a viewer within the Shorts feed count as a view, and those views are reported under the Posts content type, rather than folded into Shorts view totals.
Traffic originating from the Home feed, the Subscriptions tab, Watch Next, or a channel’s Community space does not add to that view count at all, even if a viewer opens and swipes through the entire carousel there. So, checking your post views will be a good way to identify whether your image posts have been surfacing on Shorts.
How to post a photo, long story Shorts
Ignore eligibility for now. YouTube states the update is “rolling out to eligible creators on the YouTube mobile app,” but the post does not define eligibility criteria. At the moment, there’s no guarantee your image posts will appear on the Shorts feed, but posting them as described below is the best approach to find out.
How to post a photo. Click the “create” button and select “create a post”, or head straight to the artist’s “Posts” tab on their channel (formerly called the Community tab). You can post up to 10 images in one post. Adding music, text, stickers, and filters to an image post currently requires the YouTube mobile app. YouTube also caps how many posts a single channel can publish within a 24-hour period, which applies across all post types.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source musically.com ’
