Import Your Own Design as a Template

NOT YET AVAILABLE

If you already have a carousel design you like in Canva, you can save it as a Carousel Studio template and reuse it. Carousel Studio reads the slide open on your canvas, stores the layout, and fills it with new content every time you generate a carousel.

Template import is in beta, so read the limitations below before you start.

Before you start

Open the Canva design you want to import and keep it on screen. Carousel Studio captures the page you are currently viewing, one page at a time.

A Carousel Studio template is made of three slide types:

1. Intro slide, the opening hook
2. Body slide, the repeatable content slide used for every middle slide
3. End slide, the closing call to action

Set up one page for each of these in your design before you import.

Import your design

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1. Open Carousel Studio in Canva.
2. Go to the "Customize" tab and click "Import it as a template".
3. In Canva, move to the page you want to use as your intro slide.
4. Under "Intro slide", click "Capture current slide".
5. Move to your body slide page and click "Capture current slide" under "Body slide".
6. Do the same for "End slide".
7. Type a name in the "Template name" field.
8. Click "Save template".

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You need at least one captured slide and a name to save. Carousel Studio confirms each capture and tells you how many elements it picked up.

Check what got captured

After you capture a slide, the button changes to "Slide captured". Click it to add the captured layout to a new page in your design so you can compare it against the original.

To capture a slide again, click the clear icon next to "Slide captured" and capture it once more.

Use your imported template

Your template appears under "My templates" in the "Create" tab. Click it, then click "Use template" to generate a carousel with your layout.

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What Carousel Studio captures

• Text, including font, size, weight, colour, alignment, italics, underline, strikethrough, and links
• Images, image frames, and stickers
• Shapes and their colours
• Grouped elements, which are flattened into individual elements
• Page background colour and background image
• Rotation on text, images, and shapes

What it does not capture yet

• Videos, audio, charts, tables, and embeds
• Gradient fills and other fills Canva does not expose to apps
• Anything on a page you are not currently viewing

Skipped elements are not silently dropped. Carousel Studio shows a warning such as "2 elements weren't captured because they are not yet supported" right after the capture.

Workarounds:

• Replace a gradient fill with a solid colour before you capture
• Export the slide as a PNG in Canva and set it as the page background, then capture

Stop the AI from rewriting parts of your slide

Carousel Studio rewrites the text and swaps the images in your template each time it generates a carousel. To keep something exactly as you designed it, lock the element in Canva before you capture the slide. Locked text and images are captured as is and never rewritten.

This works well for your name, handle, logo, and a fixed call to action.

How your text is treated

Text at 60px or larger becomes a heading, and smaller text becomes body copy. This decides which font slot the AI writes into.

Text boxes stacked in a column are grouped together, so longer generated copy pushes the text below it down instead of overlapping it.

Common problems

"We couldn't find any elements on the current page to capture."

You are on an empty page in Canva. Move to the page with your design and capture again.

Elements are missing from the captured slide

Those elements use a fill or an element type that is not supported yet. Check the warning shown after the capture and apply one of the workarounds above.

The generated carousel does not match my design

Simplify the slide, lock the parts that must stay fixed, and import it again as a new template.