What a template gives you
A template is a decision somebody already made for you, written down as rectangles. Each of the thirty layouts in the catalogue is a list of slots — where each one sits, how wide it is, how tall — and picking one settles the whole composition in a single tap. There is nothing to line up, nothing to nudge into place, and no way to end up with a picture three pixels out of true at eleven at night.
The part that takes the work is that every layout is drawn three times. A square, a tall post and a story are not one shape at three scales; an arrangement that sings across a square becomes a stack of letterboxes down a story. So each layout carries its own map for each shape, ninety maps in all, and switching shape re-lays the collage into the arrangement that was drawn for it.
| Photos | Layouts | Maps drawn |
|---|---|---|
| Two | 4 | 12 |
| Three | 5 | 15 |
| Four | 5 | 15 |
| Five | 3 | 9 |
| Six | 5 | 15 |
| Seven to nine | 8 | 24 |
Your photos sit in a list of their own, outside the layout. That is why trying another one is free: the pictures pour into the new slots in the order they were already in, and every bit of framing you did follows the picture rather than the rectangle it happened to be in. Tap through six layouts and back again and you lose nothing.
Five steps to a collage
One — bring your photos
Drop a handful onto the collage, pick them, or paste a screenshot. They land in the slots in reading order, and with “Grow with my photos” on — it is, on this page — a set bigger than the layout re-lays it for the new count, up to thirty. The strip under the collage holds every photo you opened, says which slot each one is in, and carries the lock.
Two — pick a layout
The first thing the Layout step shows is a row of layouts made for exactly your count, each drawn with your own photos and scored by how much of every picture its slot keeps. Under that is the whole hand-drawn catalogue, and the three modes: Grid cuts each photo to its slot, Stack drops whole prints in a loose pile, Freeform lets you place, size and turn each one yourself.
Not sure? Press Shuffle, or R. It deals the photos into the slots again — except the ones you locked with the pin in their corner, which stay exactly where they are. In Stack it deals a new pile.
Three — frame each one
Tap a slot to pick it up, then drag inside it. The photo always covers its slot, so you are moving the focal point rather than sliding a picture around an empty frame, and no corner can go blank. Pinch to zoom, turn a quarter at a time if a photo went in sideways, and double-tap to put the framing back. Drag one slot onto another and the two pictures trade places.
If the thing you are fixing is a slot edge running through somebody’s head, the Photos step can do that pass for you. “Fit the faces” downloads a 224 KB face finder from the network’s own file host — once, with the exact byte count shown before it starts — runs it here on your processor at about 16 ms a photo, and slides each picture inside its slot until no face is crossed. It writes the same two numbers your drag writes, so one step back undoes the lot. Decline it and nothing is fetched and nothing changes.
Four — style it, and add a title
Nine style families set the gutters, the outer edge, the corners, the frame round each photo and the ground in one tap, each previewed with your own pictures; every value can then be changed by hand. Six occasions — birthday, wedding, travel, graduation, a new baby, a festival — add a starting title and a few stickers on top. A collage can also be cut to a circle, a heart, a hexagon or an arch. The Text step writes a title and a caption in a band above or below the photos, or on them, and drops simple drawn stickers you can drag, size and turn.
Five — save it
Pick a size for posting or for printing, and a format: JPG, PNG, WebP, or a PDF that is one page at the real paper size. The Save button always says the pixel size and format you are about to get. The collage in progress is kept in this browser’s storage on this device, so a reload brings it back; “Start over” forgets it.
Photos it takes, and what it won't do
JPG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, BMP and GIF all open through the browser’s own decoder; an animated GIF contributes its first frame. HEIC — what a recent iPhone writes unless you have told it otherwise — needs a WebAssembly decoder that is fetched the first time one turns up and is simply absent from the page until then. Whatever the file, the orientation flag is read and resolved before anything is measured, so a photo taken in portrait does not arrive on its side.
Thirty is the most photographs one collage takes. Every one of them is reduced to a working copy the moment it opens — smaller still past a dozen — because holding thirty full-size decodes is how a phone tab gets killed mid-collage; the saved file reads each original again, one at a time. A file over 120 MB is declined. Past roughly 32 megapixels you are offered a lighter copy as a choice rather than an error, and past 100 the answer is a plain no with the measured figure named. Both ceilings come down on an iPhone or iPad, to 16 and 40, because Safari hands a canvas far less room and fails by returning a blank one instead of an error.
Two things this will not do for you
- It does not change your photographs. There are no filters, no retouching and no colour correction: every picture is drawn exactly as it came off your device, only cropped and scaled. If a photo needs fixing, fix it first and bring the result.
- It keeps one collage, not a library. The collage in progress is kept on this device so a reload brings it back, but there is no list of past collages and no project file to move to another device — start a new one and the old one is replaced. Save the file when you are done.
What people ask
- I chose a six-slot layout and only have four photos. What happens to the other two slots?
- They stay as tinted rectangles, and they will be tinted rectangles in the file you save — the Save button warns you once before it does that. A layout you tapped is never swapped behind your back. If you want the gaps gone, the Layout step lists the layouts made for exactly your count first, drawn with your own photos; your photos move across in the order they are already in, and any framing you have done comes with them. With "Grow with my photos" on, adding or removing a photo is what re-lays the collage.
- Can I drag a slot to make it bigger, or move one out of the way?
- Not in Grid mode — the slot rectangles are the template, so the moment you tap a layout you know exactly what you are getting, which is what makes the whole thing quick. If the arrangement is the part you want to control, switch to Freeform in the Layout step: every photo becomes a whole print you drag, resize from its corner and turn from its top handle, or move with the arrow keys. Stack does the same but starts from a loose pile.
- Why does the same layout look different when I switch from square to story?
- Because it is a different arrangement, drawn on purpose. A three-slot layout that reads as one wide picture over two small ones works across a square and falls apart down a 1080 by 1920 story, where the same proportions become three letterboxes. Every hand-drawn layout carries a separate map for the square, the tall post and the story, ninety in all, so changing shape re-lays the collage rather than stretching it. The widescreen and print sizes read the nearest drawn map, turned on its side where the frame is landscape.
- The top of someone's head is cut off. How do I move the photo inside its slot?
- Tap the slot once so it picks up an outline, then drag the picture. It always covers the slot, so you are choosing which part shows rather than dragging a picture around an empty box, and no corner can end up blank. Pinch, or scroll with a mouse, to zoom in first if the slot is much squarer than the photo. A double-tap puts the framing back where it started.
- Which size should I use for WhatsApp?
- The 1080 by 1920 story shape, if it is going on your status — that is the proportion of a phone screen and it fills it without bars. For a display picture the square is the right pick, because the crop that gets applied is a circle inside a square and a tall collage loses its top and bottom to it. Both are the same collage; changing shape is one tap in the Layout or Save step and costs you nothing.
- Does the saved collage keep the quality of my originals?
- Each slot is a crop of your photo scaled to the size that slot occupies in a 1080-pixel-wide picture, so a 12-megapixel photo in a quarter-slot is reduced a long way — that is what a collage is. What it does not do is work from the small preview on screen: when you save, every photo is read out of its original file again, one at a time, and drawn at full size. The thing you looked at and the thing that lands in your camera roll are the same arrangement, only sharper.
Five other doors into the same editor
Each of these opens the editor already set up, because the first thing you see ought to match what you came for. Nothing is locked once you are in — the whole strip is still there, and switching to a layout with a different slot count carries your photographs across.
- Three photosThe five three-slot layouts, and which one suits portraits.
- Four photosEven quarters, a lead picture, and the uneven four.
- Six photosSix that stay big enough to read on a phone.
- Nine photosThe three-by-three, and two ways out of it.
- Sized for InstagramOpens square, with the tall post and the story one tap away.
The title, the stickers and the print edges are deliberately small: a line of text, nine drawn shapes, three kinds of edge. Enough to say whose birthday it is, not a design suite.
What the choice of ground costs you in file size
Left on Auto, the ground colour decides the format. Set a ground and the gaps are opaque, so the collage saves as a JPG at quality 0.92. Leave the ground at none and the gaps have to stay see-through, so it saves as a PNG — and a PNG of nine photographs is a lossless encode of nine photographs, which is heavy. The Save step lets you override that with JPG, PNG, WebP or PDF, and set the quality of the lossy ones.
| Ground | Saved as | Estimated size |
|---|---|---|
| Any colour | JPG at 0.92 | 0.3–0.8 MB |
| None, gaps see-through | PNG | 2–5 MB |
| None, gap set to zero | PNG | 2–5 MB |
Those three sizes are worked out from the encoder settings and from what photographs usually cost at that pixel count. They are not measurements: no collage has been saved on a real device and weighed to check them, so read them as the right order of magnitude and nothing finer. What you actually get is printed next to the save button, in kilobytes, once the file exists.
That third row is the one that catches people. With no gap there is nothing transparent left in the picture, but the file is still a PNG, so you pay several megabytes for a collage that would have looked identical as a JPG. If the collage is going to a chat app, give it a white ground and take the smaller file.
Three longer pieces, if you want the reasoning
The inspector can tell you what a control does. It cannot tell you that six photographs usually read better than eight, or that a story-shaped collage loses its top and bottom to the interface of whatever is showing it. That is what the written pages are for.
- The write-upsThree longer pieces on slot counts, shapes and picking an arrangement.
- How many photos to useWhy three and six flatter faces more than four does.
- Which size for which app1080 × 1080, 1080 × 1350 and 1080 × 1920, and what each one crops.
- Choosing a layoutLead layouts against even grids, and what a gap is worth.
Your photos are read straight off your phone into this page, arranged in the layout you picked and saved back out, and none of that involves a server, because there isn't one behind this page.