Guides

Building a photo deck that holds up

The mechanics that decide whether a photo post gets read past slide one.

Shape and framing

TikTok photo posts render at 4:5. Anything you bring in at a different shape has to give something up. BRoller pads rather than crops by default, filling the gap with a colour sampled from the edge of your image, because a padded car is still a car and a cropped one is a door panel.

Override it per slide when the framing crops well anyway. Wide scene shots, roads, interiors and crowds usually survive a centre crop. Single subjects almost never do.

The safe area

TikTok draws its own interface over your image: the caption and account name along the bottom left, the action column down the right side, and progress dots near the top. BRoller shows this as a dotted overlay in the editor. Keep text inside it. A line that looks perfect in the editor and disappears behind the share button in the app is the single most common avoidable mistake.

Slide order

• Slide one carries the whole post. It has to state a claim, pose a question, or show something that is not obvious. If slide one is a warm up, the post is over.
• Slides two to five deliver. One idea each. Resist stacking two thoughts on one image.
• The last slide should leave something open. A comparison, an unanswered question, a "which one" prompt. That is what pulls comments.

Chronology is not an argument. If your best image is the seventh thing that happened, it still goes first.

Text on the image

BRoller measures local contrast across each image and places the line where the background is calmest, then picks light or dark type against it. You can drag it anywhere. Two rules worth keeping:

• One line per slide. Two lines is a paragraph and people scroll past paragraphs.
• Keep the type treatment identical across the deck. Changing font or colour mid deck reads as a mistake, not as variety.

Length

Six to twelve slides covers almost everything. Under six rarely justifies the format. Over about fifteen and completion falls off a cliff, which drags the whole post down. If you have twenty good images, that is two posts.

Reuse without repeating

Never use the same image twice inside one deck. It is the fastest way to look like the deck was padded to hit a number, and viewers notice it immediately. If you are short, cut the deck rather than repeat a slide.