Make Instagram Carousels in N8N and Make.com
This tutorial demonstrates how to automate Instagram carousel and TikTok slideshow creation using the Blue Potato tool within both Make.com and N8N automation platforms. The walkthrough covers three industry examples—real estate, life coaching, and restaurants—showing different prompt strategies and template options. Results are stored in Airtable and can optionally be posted directly to social media platforms.
Summary
The video is a hands-on tutorial led by Kevin, an automation builder based in Malta, guided by host Sabrina, showing how to automate the creation of Instagram carousels and TikTok slideshows using a tool called Blue Potato (also referred to as 'Blot' or 'potato' throughout). The automation is built in both Make.com and N8N, with templates available for download via the YouTube description.
The tutorial is structured around three industry use cases—real estate, life coaching, and restaurants—to illustrate how the same automation framework can be adapted across different business types. In Make.com, users select their industry by changing a single keyword in the blueprint, which routes the automation down the appropriate branch. Each branch uses Blue Potato to generate carousel visuals, with a 60-second sleep module built in to allow rendering time. Results are then stored as structured records in Airtable, where each entry includes the industry tag, source platform, slide content, and generated images.
Two main approaches to prompting are demonstrated. The first is explicit slide-by-slide definition, where the user specifies the content of each individual slide. The second uses OpenAI to generate a high-level prompt based on business context, which is then passed to Blue Potato to autonomously populate the carousel. Kevin emphasizes that this second approach reduces the need for over-engineering and lets the AI tools handle creative decisions.
In N8N, the workflow is described as simpler in some respects—lacking the iterator and aggregator modules required in Make.com—but it adds a smart wait loop that checks every five seconds whether the carousel has been rendered, retrying automatically until the asset is ready rather than relying on a fixed sleep timer. This is highlighted as a key advantage of N8N for asynchronous asset generation tasks.
The tutorial showcases several Blue Potato templates including billboard-style infographics, steampunk-style infographics, and minimalist single-centered-text slideshows, demonstrating the visual variety available. Kevin notes that users can pass either detailed structured prompts or loose, even imperfectly formatted text, and Blue Potato will intelligently map the content to the appropriate carousel structure.
The video closes by noting that posting to Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, Facebook, or LinkedIn is a natural next step, achievable by adding a 'Create Post' node in Blue Potato, though that process is covered in separate videos.
Key Insights
- Kevin explains that in Make.com, the entire multi-industry automation is controlled by changing a single keyword in a note module—switching between 'real estate,' 'life coach,' and 'restaurant' routes the workflow down the corresponding branch without any structural changes.
- Kevin describes two distinct prompting strategies for Blue Potato: one where every slide's content is explicitly defined by the user, and another where OpenAI generates a high-level prompt that Blue Potato then autonomously maps to carousel slides, reducing manual effort.
- Kevin contrasts Make.com's fixed 60-second sleep module with N8N's dynamic wait loop, which checks every 5 seconds whether the carousel is ready and retries automatically—eliminating the need to restart the automation if rendering takes longer than expected.
- Sabrina notes that Blue Potato intelligently maps whatever is passed in the prompt field to the appropriate carousel or infographic template parameters behind the scenes, meaning users can pass loosely formatted or even imperfect text and still get a coherent output.
- Kevin advises against trying to craft a perfect prompt, arguing that over-engineering the prompt can actually be counterproductive—Blue Potato and OpenAI will handle the creative heavy lifting nine times out of ten given basic business context.
Topics
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