How to make a collage from twelve photos
- Open ten or twelve photos. Drop the whole set on the collage. Twelve fill a twelve-slot layout; ten fill a ten-slot one.
- Pick one of the six. Ten even and Twelve even are plain grids; the two lead layouts give one photo the room of four; the two uneven ones suit mixed shapes.
- Keep faces whole. With this many small slots, a face is easy to cut. Press Keep faces whole in the Photos step; it says the download size first and moves only photos whose faces it can save.
- Read the result and save. The result is one sentence — photos, faces, slots moved, faces still crossed — with a button to jump to any slot that is still too small for its face. Then press Save.
Twelve small slots, drawn so they stay readable
At twelve photos a collage stops being a set of pictures and becomes a texture, unless each slot is still large enough to see into. Every map here keeps the smallest slot at 18% of the frame's short edge or more — about 195 pixels on a 1080-pixel-wide square, post or story. Below that a face turns into a dot on a phone screen.
One large, eleven small and One large, nine small give the room of three or four slots to one photo. That is the layout for a family day where one group photo is the reason for the collage.
| Layout | Photos | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Ten even | 10 | A set of equals |
| One large, nine small | 10 | One group photo and nine more |
| Ten, unevenly | 10 | Mixed shapes |
| Twelve even | 12 | A year, one photo a month |
| One large, eleven small | 12 | A family album page |
| Twelve, unevenly | 12 | Mixed shapes |
What the face finder does here
It is a small detector, 224 KB, that runs in this tab and reports a box round each face — nothing else, no identity, nothing kept. The fit then slides each photo inside its slot so the boxes stay inside. In a check of four thousand random slots run every time the site is built, it never once left fewer faces whole than before.
Eleven photos on a twelve-slot layout leaves one slot empty; the stage tints it and Save warns once. The home page's Grow with my photos picks a generated layout for exactly eleven instead.
Questions people ask about this one
Can I make a 10 photo collage here?
Yes. Three of the six layouts are drawn for exactly ten photos.
Is there a layout for eleven?
Not a hand-drawn one. The home page generates layouts for any count from one to thirty, and labels them as generated.
Will my photos look soft?
On the social shapes each photo is drawn at the size its slot occupies in a 1080-pixel-wide picture, from your original file. For print, the Save step lists the pixels per inch each slot will print at.
Do I have to use the face finder?
No. It never runs unless you press it, and every slot can be framed by dragging instead.
Is anything sent to a server?
Your photos are not. The only thing that ever travels is the face detector, from our model file server to you, and only if you press for it.