How to make a collage from eight photos
- Open the eight photos. Drop them on the collage; they fill the slots in reading order, left to right and top to bottom.
- Put the wide one in the banner. Slot 1 is the full-width banner. Drag your widest photo onto it.
- Or choose an even layout. Eight even is a four-by-two grid on a square and a two-by-four grid on a post or story.
- Save. Press Save. Every photo is read again at full size, one at a time, so eight photos save as easily as two.
The banner, and why it opens first
Eight photos in an even grid are eight equal votes, which is right for a set of products or a week of meals and wrong for most days out. A banner over seven gives the strongest photo the full width and lets the rest line up underneath in two rows. On a square the banner is a little over a third of the height; on a story it is just over a quarter, so it never crowds the rows below.
One large, seven small is the alternative for a portrait lead: the big slot sits in the corner and takes three quarters of the width. Eight, unevenly mixes row heights and widths for a set with no obvious lead.
Eight on a phone screen
On a story, eight slots in a two-by-four grid are 540 by 480 pixels each — comfortably large. The banner layout's smallest cell on a story is 360 pixels wide, a third of the frame. Those numbers are why the story maps are drawn separately rather than squeezed from the square ones.
If the collage is going to WhatsApp as a profile picture, the WhatsApp collage page shows which slots the circle cuts off and offers only the layouts that survive it.
Questions people ask about this one
Which eight-photo layout is best for a family?
A banner over seven: put the group photo in the banner and the individual photos underneath.
Can I make the gaps white and thick?
Yes. In Style, raise Gap and Outer edge, or choose the Gallery family for a wide white mount.
What if I only have seven?
One slot stays empty and is tinted on the stage; Save tells you once before saving an empty rectangle. The seven-photo page has layouts drawn for seven.
Does the face finder work here?
Yes. Keep faces whole in the Photos step downloads a 224 KB face detector once, after telling you its size, and slides each photo so faces stay whole. It never runs unless you press it.
Can I save it as a PDF?
Yes. Choose PDF in the Save step; for print sizes the page is the real paper size, so it prints at size without a scaling dialog.