About this collage maker

There are two honest ways to build a collage tool. One gives you an empty surface and lets you place, resize and overlap every picture yourself; the other gives you finished arrangements and asks only which one you want. The first is more capable and takes ten minutes. The second takes forty seconds, and forty seconds is what most people actually have when they are standing outside a restaurant trying to post something.

This site leans hard toward the second kind: a layout is already chosen before you open anything, the suggestions are scored on your own photographs, and five numbered steps — photos, layout, style, text, save — take you from a folder to a file. Thirty-nine arrangements are drawn by hand three times each, for the square, the tall post and the story, and the reason for drawing rather than deriving them is that automatic reflow into a tall frame looks obviously automatic. Past twelve photographs, and for the Facebook cover, the layouts are generated for the exact count and proportion instead. If you do want to place each picture yourself, the freeform mode is there, but it is not where the tool starts.

There are no filters and no retouching: every photograph is drawn exactly as it came off your device, only cropped and scaled. The text is a title and a caption, not a type editor, and the stickers are eighteen simple drawn shapes, not a library — enough to say whose birthday it is without turning a collage tool into a design suite. And thirty photographs is the ceiling, because past that every picture is too small to read in any of the sizes offered here.

There is no account and no cloud copy. The one collage you are working on is kept in this browser’s own storage on this device, so a reload brings it back, but there is no list of past collages and nothing follows you to another device. That is a real limit and it is written on the homepage rather than hidden here.

It is made by a small team who think a collage should take forty seconds. That is the whole idea: a page that does one thing well and costs nothing to use. Nobody is asked to sign up because there is nothing to sign up to.

If something here is broken or a layout behaves oddly on your phone, the most useful thing you can say is which shape you were in, how many photographs were open, and what the browser is — those three facts usually locate it.