Adding specific portfolio items to carousel

Hello,

I’m working on a project for which my client wants a portfolio carousel on the home page that displays certain posts. I realize I can achieve this by assigning a special category, such as “featured” to those posts. The problem is, the “Featured” category then becomes a filter option on the main portfolio page. We don’t want that there. If I omit the “Featured” category from the main portfolio page, all posts assigned that category disappear, even if they’re assigned to another category. That’s not what we want.

Is there any way to add portfolio posts to a carousel based on the post ID, rather than trying to hack it with a category we don’t really want?

Thanks,
Eric