Adaptive designs let a Meta catalog ad pin one of your designs by name instead of by position — so the ad keeps showing the creative you chose while Meta still picks the shape that fits where it runs.
Updated September 21, 2026
Adaptive designs is a Meta feed capability that gives your designs names. Instead of an ad picking "the second image in the feed", it pins a design group by name — and because the name doesn't say anything about shape, Meta can still choose the square, portrait, or story version of that same design for wherever the ad is running.
It's a Meta-only capability, set up on a Meta channel's Fields tab, and it's opt-in — a channel you don't turn it on for keeps working exactly as it does today.
A Meta catalog ad answers two separate questions each time it's shown, and it's worth keeping them apart:
The two used to fight each other. When an ad pins a design by position — "always show image number 2" — that pin is absolute: Meta shows exactly that image everywhere, so a square design gets letterboxed into a tall placement and a tall one gets cropped into a feed. Pinning by name doesn't have that problem, because a name can belong to several images of different shapes, and Meta is free to pick among them.
Meta is also moving away from position selection on its own. In its own words, "legacy image selections, such as by index, are discouraged and will be eventually removed." Adaptive designs is how a Renable channel stops depending on it.
A design group is a named creative concept — black-friday, evergreen, summer-sale. Inside a
group sits one design per shape:
| Shape | What it's for |
|---|---|
| Square | Feed-style surfaces, and the fallback when nothing more specific fits |
| Portrait | 4:5 surfaces |
| Story | 9:16 surfaces |
A group doesn't have to carry all three, and a design's shape comes from the template size it renders — a 1080 × 1080 size is a Square design, a 1080 × 1920 one is a Story design. A size that matches none of the three is listed by its pixel dimensions instead of being given a shape name it doesn't have.
A design's name is the name — there is no separate label. Group and design names are lowercase
letters, numbers, and dashes, and the name you type is literally the string an ad pins. That's why
the name boxes rewrite what you type as you type it: "Black Friday" becomes black-friday on screen,
because that is what will be in your feed.
The Adaptive designs dialog shows your groups as a grid. Columns are shapes — Square, Portrait and Story are always there, plus a column for any other shape one of your designs uses. Rows are groups, and each group is two rows: its image designs, then its video designs. You can tell them apart at a glance — a video design's tile carries a play badge, and its caption ends with how long the video runs.
Every cell in a row is either a design or an empty cell:
When you create a group you give it one Studio template, and Renable prefills the group with one design per size that template has. That's a starting point, not a permanent binding: each design in a group can be pointed at a different template on its own, so a group can render its Story from one template and its Square from another.
Hover a design and click the pencil to open its picker. The picker is also where that design's own details live:
Video designs work the same way, offered against templates that can render video, and constrained to the column's shape exactly as image designs are.
A shape only gets you so far. Two of Meta's surfaces are both 9:16 and still want different artwork, and Instagram is not Facebook. So an image design in the Default designs group can also be marked preferred for a surface, in the Preferred for row of that design's picker:
| Preference | What the mark asks for |
|---|---|
| Asks Meta to pick this design for Instagram rather than Facebook | |
| Stories | Asks Meta to pick this design for Stories, whose safe zone is its own |
| Reels | Asks Meta to pick this design for Reels, whose safe zone is different again |
In Meta's own words, "there are 2 different tags for 9:16 placements because the safe zone for Stories and Reels is different" — the parts of the frame that stay clear of Meta's own interface aren't in the same place, so one 9:16 design can't be right for both. That's what these are for: make two 9:16 sizes in Studio, point one design at each, and mark one Stories and the other Reels. Instagram is a different question — it's about the platform, not the shape, so any default image design can carry it.
The Preferred for row is only offered on the Default designs group. That isn't a restriction we invented to keep things tidy — it's what the marks turn out to do.
In our testing, a design carrying one of these marks wins its surface for every ad on the channel,
whether the ad is pinned to a group or not. A mark is therefore a claim on a placement for the whole
channel rather than a preference belonging to one group: putting a Reels mark on black-friday would
take Reels away from every other ad too, including ads pinned to a different group entirely. Meta
documents none of this and we've confirmed it in ad previews rather than in live delivery, so treat it
as our reading rather than a promise — but it's the reading the product is built on.
Two consequences follow, and the dialog says both out loud:
black-friday still
shows the default group's Story design on Stories. If you want a different Story design, change the
default group's — that changes it for everyone.Three more things worth knowing:
Marked designs show their chips on the cell, so you can read your coverage without opening anything. When two designs of one shape are marked differently, they sit side by side in the same cell — a Stories one and a Reels one in the Story column — because they are two answers to one shape. Two designs of a shape marked the same way (or not marked at all) don't stack: nothing tells them apart, so the second one moves to Also in this group below the row.
You'll also see a dashed 4:5 auto or 9:16 auto chip on some of the default designs. That one isn't a choice — it's Meta's shape marker, added from the design's own size. See below.
The Default designs row carries its own warning when it's missing a shape another group covers, or a surface mark another group carries. It names what's missing, what an ad that isn't pinned to a group has to fall back on, and what to do — add the missing design, or mark the one already in that cell. The cell to work in is right above the warning.
This matters because nothing pins the default designs: an ad with no group pin is matched against all of your product images, so wherever the defaults have nothing to offer, Meta reaches for some other image in your feed. Which one it picks isn't documented anywhere.
The first group — the one created when you turn adaptive designs on — is the base group, marked Default designs in the dialog. It's what every ad shows unless it's pinned to another group, and it's the only group that carries Meta's own reserved markers — the dashed 4:5 auto and 9:16 auto shape chips, and the Instagram, Stories and Reels marks above — so its designs need no per-ad tagging for Meta to match a design to a surface. The shape chips are added from each design's own size and aren't something you set; the surface marks are yours to choose. That's the feed side only — on the ad side, shape adaptation still depends on Adapt to placement being switched on, base group or not, as it does for every group. When you pin a group from the Renable Options extension, Renable switches that setting on for the version of the ad it creates, so you don't have to.
Adding a group never changes which image a running ad shows. A group's image designs only ever appear on ads you deliberately pin to it — that's what keeping every reserved marker on the base group alone buys you, and it's why a new creative concept is safe to build while your campaigns run.
If an older group still carries a surface mark from before, its row says so and the design's picker lets you take it off. Until you do, that mark is deciding a surface for every ad on the channel.
Video is broader, and that's Meta's design rather than ours. A group's video designs are the product's videos like any other, so any ad with Dynamic Media on can draw on them whether or not it is pinned to that group — and if your base group carries no video, a new group's video becomes the product's default one. Add image designs freely; add a video to a group when you're ready for Meta to be able to use it. See Get video into your catalog ads.
Turning adaptive designs on converts your channel's flat image fields into design blocks. Your main image becomes the group's first design and each additional image the next one, in the same order, keeping their bindings exactly as they were.
Two consequences are worth knowing before you do it:
image_link and additional_image_link stop being columns. That is correct, not a missing
field: Meta ignores a plain main image when a product carries image blocks, so keeping both would
mean shipping a column Meta discards. Renable's field checks know this — those rows report that the
design groups cover them rather than reporting them as missing.A design group's images are all still in one feed, so nothing about this creates a second catalog or a parallel feed.
Design blocks are ordinary fields, so a converted channel could carry a dozen of them — all named
image or video, each with its own sub-fields underneath. The Fields tab collapses them into
one Adaptive designs row in the Media group rather than listing them:
image_link and additional_image_link being absent from the feed reads as correct rather than as
something missing.Only designs Renable built are collected there. A nested block you added by hand stays an ordinary field in its own group — it's your field, and the row never takes one over.
Show raw fields expands the design blocks as ordinary field rows you can edit like any other,
each back in its own place in the field list, so the order you read is the order your feed sends.
Each one is captioned with the group and shape its design is, which is how you tell a dozen fields
named image apart. One quiet line above them says the thing worth knowing first: the tag values are
what ads pin, so changing one un-pins the ads on it. The dialog is the safer path — the rows are
there for when you need them.
On a Meta channel you haven't converted yet, the Media group ends with an invitation to set adaptive designs up. It appears only when your image fields render Studio templates, because naming a design is what buys you something, and a column bound straight to the merchant's product photo isn't one.
A group can hold video designs alongside its image designs. They're two facets of the same creative concept rather than two things to choose between — Meta decides per impression whether to show a product's image or its video, through its Dynamic Media feature.
A few things about video that are worth stating plainly:
When you pin an ad to a group that carries video, Renable turns Dynamic Media on for that ad's new creative — that switch is what lets a catalog video serve at all. For an image-only group it turns Dynamic Media off instead, so Meta shows exactly the design you chose.
If your channel already sends a plain product-video column, the Adaptive designs dialog says so and leaves it alone: it stays your ads' default video, and video designs are added beside it.
Pinning happens in Meta Ads Manager, through the Renable Options browser extension. On a channel with adaptive designs on, the panel lists your design groups rather than a flat list of images — each one shown as a strip of its designs at their true shapes, image and video together — and Use switches the ad to that group. The group the ad is currently running also lists each design's name, size and coverage under its strip; the groups you could switch to show their shapes only.
The panel also tells you which mechanism the open ad is using. An ad that still picks its design by position says so, and switching it to a group is what moves it over.
Renable's side of this is exact: it writes the design blocks into your feed and writes the name-based pin onto the ad's creative. What happens after that is Meta's, and the copy in the product is careful about the line:
Where a group is missing a shape, an ad pinned to it uses another of that group's designs — which can show letterboxed. Meta documents this for carousels specifically: if none of the products have a 9:16 image the default display is used, but if some do, "the rest of the image is filled with the image background color." The Adaptive designs dialog nudges you when a group is missing a shape the base group has: the missing shape is an empty cell in the group's row, with a warning just beneath it explaining what an ad pinned to that group will show instead. The warning carries no link of its own — clicking the empty cell above it is the fix.
Turn off adaptive designs, in the dialog's footer, converts the image designs back to plain image fields in their current order — the first design becomes the main image, the rest become additional images, keeping their values. Group and design names are dropped.
It flattens every group, not just the base one, so you may end up with more image fields than you started with: three groups of three shapes come back as nine image fields — one main image and eight additional ones — because there's nowhere else for those designs to go. If you only wanted to drop one concept, delete that group instead of turning the feature off.
Video designs have no plain field to convert back to, so they're removed, and the dialog lists them by name in the confirmation before anything happens.
Like every other change on the channel page, all of this edits a draft — publishing the channel is what deploys it to your live feed.
Do I have to use this?
No. A Meta channel that never turns it on keeps working exactly as it does now, and Renable will not migrate one for you. Position selection still works today — Meta calls it legacy but has given no removal date.
Will turning it on break ads that are already running?
No. The conversion keeps design order, so an ad pinned to a position keeps showing the same design. Adding further groups can't change the image an existing ad shows either, because their image designs only appear on ads pinned to them by name. Two things do reach unpinned ads: video — a group's videos are the product's videos, and Dynamic Media lets any ad draw on them — and a leftover surface mark on another group's design, which is a marked image in your feed like any other. The group's own row warns you about the second one and the design's picker lets you remove it.
Can a group have a different design per placement?
Not per placement, no, and that's a Meta limit rather than a Renable one — an ad pins one design group, and Meta chooses what to show per surface. Different designs for different placements means separate ad sets.
What a group can do is give each shape its own template — see The grid: one row per group, one column per shape. Instagram, Stories and Reels are marked on the default designs and apply to every ad, so they aren't a per-group answer either. Both are Meta matching a design to a surface on its own, not you assigning one; you're describing your designs and Meta still decides what runs where.
Why does my group name look different from what I typed?
Because the name is what your feed sends and what an ad pins, so the box shows you the real thing rather than a prettier version of it.
One group's designs are missing from the feed for some products. Why?
A design can only produce an image if the template it points at can build one for that product, or — for a design that uses the product's own photo rather than a template — if the product has a photo at all. When something the design needs is missing for a product, a picture it places or a piece of copy it writes in, Renable can't produce the image.
That design is then left out of the feed for those products entirely. Renable doesn't send a half-finished design: an image with no picture behind it is worse than no image, so the whole design is skipped for that product and your other designs are sent as normal. The product is reported as content missing, the same warning you get for any other field Renable can't fill, and the product's name is in the event so you can open it and see which piece of content is short.
A product with content missing is treated like any other product with content missing. On a Meta channel the rule that ships with the channel sets the product's status to archived, which takes it out of your active catalog so it stops running as an ad until the design can be built. That's deliberate, and it isn't special to designs — the same rule does the same thing for a missing price or a missing title. Check your channel's rules if you want it handled differently.
The same thing happens, briefly, while a design is still rendering. The first time a design is used Renable has to produce an image for every product, which takes a while; until that finishes the design is simply absent from the feed and then appears on its own. Nothing is reported, because nothing is wrong, and Renable waits for the renders before it publishes the feed rather than sending products whose images are still on their way — your live feed keeps its previous contents in the meantime. A design reported as missing content will never fill in on its own — something has to change about the product's content or about the template.
Renable waits up to an hour, then publishes. If renders are still finishing after that, the feed goes out with what is ready rather than leaving your live feed unchanged for longer — and the products whose designs aren't finished go out archived (or out of stock, depending on the channel's rules) for that one update, exactly as they would if you pressed Regenerate. They come back on the next update, once their designs are made. You'll see a warning on the channel saying it happened and how many images were still being made. On a normal catalog the renders land long before the hour is up; it takes an unusually large catalog, a template that renders slowly, or running out of credits to reach it.
One button skips that wait on purpose: Regenerate. It exists to publish the feed with whatever is ready right now, so if you press it while a new design is still rendering, the products whose image isn't finished go out as archived and come back on the next update. Publish doesn't do this — it starts the rendering immediately but still waits for it before the feed goes live.
One thing to know if you pin ads by position rather than by design group: in an XML or JSON feed, a design that is absent for a product shifts the positions of that product's later designs. A CSV or TSV feed keeps every design in its own columns, so nothing moves there. Pinning by group name, which is what the Renable Options panel does, isn't affected either way.
What happens if I rename a group or a design?
Ads pinned to the old name fall back to your default designs until they're pinned again — the dialog confirms this before letting a rename through. Names are meant to be set once and left alone.