4 ways to curate content on Instagram now that Guides is gone
If you're looking for your old Instagram Guides, they're gone. Instagram officially retired the feature on December 15, 2023, after it never quite caught on the way the platform hoped.
Guides let you curate collections of posts, places or products into a single, shareable, mini-blog-style page on your profile. It was a genuinely useful idea for content curation, gift guides, resource roundups, FAQ collections, but Instagram never promoted it heavily, and it was ultimately shelved.
The good news is that the underlying goal, curating your best content into something followers can browse, is still very achievable on Instagram today. It just lives across a few different features now instead of one dedicated tool. The following are four ways to recreate (and in some cases improve on) what Guides used to do.
| Feature | Best for |
|---|---|
| Highlights | A permanent, public menu of your best evergreen content |
| Pinned posts and highlights | Making sure new visitors see your most important content first |
| Carousel posts | A single curated, swipeable roundup, similar to a mini Guide |
| Collections | Private research and planning, not a public-facing replacement |
Use Highlights as your permanent, curated menu
Highlights are the closest thing Instagram has to a direct Guides replacement. Unlike regular Stories, which disappear after 24 hours, Highlights stay visible indefinitely as circular icons on your profile, right below your bio.
Organize them by topic the same way you might have organized a Guide: FAQs, product categories, customer reviews, event recaps, tutorials or behind-the-scenes content. Most brands find five to eight well-organized Highlights hits the sweet spot between thorough and overwhelming.
One limitation worth knowing: you can only add your own Stories to your Highlights directly. If you want to feature a customer's tagged Story as part of your curated collection (a great way to showcase user-generated content), you'll need to reshare it to your own Story first, then save that to a Highlight.
Instagram is also testing a feature that lets you add content straight to Highlights without posting it to your Story first, which would make maintaining these collections considerably less clunky. It's still rolling out, so don't be surprised if it's not available on your account yet.
Check out our nine tips to create engaging Instagram Stories for more on building the content that eventually lives in your Highlights.
Make your six pinned slots count
Instagram gives every profile six of the most visible slots on the platform: three pinned feed posts at the top of your grid, and three pinned Highlights in the row above it. Together, they're often the first thing a new visitor sees, arguably more valuable real estate than a Guide ever was, since Guides required an extra tap to even find.
Use those six slots the way you'd use a Guide's table of contents: your strongest introduction to the brand, a top FAQ, a bestselling product, a standout testimonial, whatever tells a new visitor who you are and why they should stick around, all within the first five seconds on your profile.
Since September 2025, Instagram has also let you pin your own comments on a post, not just ones from followers, which gives you a second, editable line of curated context under any piece of content: an FAQ answer, a link reminder or additional detail you want every visitor to see.
Audit your pinned posts and Highlights every quarter or so. What was your strongest content three months ago may not be your strongest content now.
Bundle curated content into a carousel post
A carousel post can hold up to 20 images or videos in a single, swipeable post, which makes it a solid stand-in for the kind of curated roundup a Guide used to deliver: a gift guide, a step-by-step tutorial, a resource list or a themed collection of tips.
Instagram also now lets you reorder the slides of a carousel after it's already published, so a curated roundup doesn't have to be perfect (or final) the moment you hit post.
Once you've built a strong carousel, it's also a natural candidate for one of your three pinned post slots, keeping your best curated content visible well past the usual lifespan of a feed post.
See our 16 Instagram marketing tips for more ways to build content worth curating in the first place.
Use Collections for research, not public curation
Instagram Collections (the private bookmarking feature behind the save icon) sometimes gets mistaken for a Guides replacement, but the two work differently. Collections are private folders visible only to you, useful for organizing inspiration, competitor research or content ideas by topic, not for showing followers a curated experience.
Think of Collections as your behind-the-scenes planning tool that feeds the other three tactics above, rather than something you publish directly to your audience.
If you want a way to send curated updates directly to an audience rather than waiting for them to find your profile, Instagram's Broadcast Channels (one-way messages from you to subscribers) are worth exploring as well.
In conclusion
Losing a dedicated feature is never fun, but Guides' disappearance isn't really a loss of capability, just a shift in where that capability lives. Between Highlights, your six pinned slots, carousel posts and Collections, you can rebuild everything Guides used to do, often with better visibility than Guides ever had.
Check out the 14 biggest mistakes businesses make on Instagram and how to avoid them, and if impersonators or account verification are a concern as your profile grows, see our seven tips to get verified on Instagram.
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