Carousel / album uploads for Instagram posts is still badly needed in March of 2021. Hootsuite internal reporting shows carousel post types on average get 1.4x reach and 3.1x engagement [1].
For anyone else viewing this issue, Facebook does make this silly difficult. Hubspot is required to register for the Graph API and they have separate restrictions for Normal Users vs Business vs Creator IG accounts. For business accounts (I’m assuming 90%+ of the use case for folks in this forum) they then are required to use the IG Media endpoint [2] which is what currently has the publishing restriction to not allow children IG media objects.
Seeing as how certain companies seemingly have somehow gotten permission from Facebook to schedule & post carousel post types via API, I’m assuming someone on the Hubspot/Facebook liason team should be able to strike a similar deal. Hubspot drives crazy amounts of ad traffic for Facebook, how can that not be used leverage into getting access to the Carousel endpoint [3]? If those companies are lying or just using a push notification workaround… there’s not a lot Hubspot can do here.
I’m not currently aware of a good workaround. However, there’s a couple things that make this “ok”:
1. Links aren’t allowed in IG captions so the shortened Hubspot URL wasn’t going to help here
2. Hubspot is still able to pull social engagement stats on posts, even if you don’t post them through the platform. As far as I’m aware, there are no downsides, but someone please chime in if there are known tradeoffs.
3. Hubspots image sizing & editing interface is worse than the IG app (sorry Hubspot, it needs work). Multiplied across multiple images of varying sizes… it’s easier currently to do in the IG app.
4. You can use Facebook’s Creator Studio to schedule posts (it’s free)
Sources:
[1] - How to make the most of Instagram carousels in 2025 [GUIDE]
[2] - https://developers.facebook.com/docs/instagram-api/reference/ig-media
[3] - https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/reference/instagram-carousel/#Creating