Choosing a collage layout

Thirty layouts is more than anybody wants to browse. These are the three questions that cut it down to two or three candidates in about ten seconds.

Question one: is there a lead picture?

Every layout here is either even or uneven, and that single distinction settles most of the choice. An even layout — three columns, four square, nine in a grid — gives every photograph the same weight, and the eye reads the result as a list. An uneven one gives one slot substantially more room, and the eye reads that slot as the subject and the rest as context.

So look at your pictures and ask whether one of them is the reason you are making this at all. If the answer comes immediately, take a lead layout and put that photograph in the big slot. If you hesitate, the set is a set and an even grid will not be fighting you.

The lead slot as a share of the frame, square output
Layout	Slots	Lead slot
Lead and follow	2	64% of the width
One on top, two under	3	58% of the height
One large, three along	4	68% of the width
One large, five around	6	66% of both
A banner over eight	9	40% of the height

Question two: what shape are the photographs?

A slot crops whatever goes in it, because the picture is scaled to cover the slot and the overflow is trimmed. That is the mechanism that stops a corner ever coming up blank, and it is also the thing that eats the top of a tall building placed in a wide slot.

A mixed set — some portrait, some landscape — is best served by the mosaic layouts, which are the ones with visibly different cell shapes. They exist for exactly this: somewhere wide for the wide ones and somewhere tall for the tall ones, in the same arrangement. A set that is all portraits does well in column layouts; a set that is all landscapes does well in row layouts and badly in columns.

When the crop still hurts

Before changing layout, try changing the framing. Tap the slot, drag the picture inside it, and zoom out to the minimum — at zoom 100 the slot shows as much of the photograph as it can. Most crops that look wrong are a framing problem rather than an arrangement problem, and the fix takes a second.

Question three: separate pictures or one picture?

The gap slider is doing more work than it looks like. At zero, with the outer edge at zero too, the slots meet flush and the collage reads as a single image that happens to be divided. Push the gap to twenty with a pale ground and each slot becomes its own framed photograph sitting on a card.

Neither is better. A continuous collage suits pictures of one scene, where the divisions are structure. A gapped collage suits pictures from different places, where the divisions are the point. Corner rounding pushes further in the second direction; a rounded, gapped nine-grid reads as a contact sheet.

The five steps, in order

Sort the pictures before the layout. Decide whether one photograph is the reason for the collage. If it is, you want an uneven layout with a lead slot; if it is not, an even grid is the honest arrangement.
Match the slot shapes to the photo shapes. Put the tallest photograph in the tallest slot and the widest in the widest. A picture always covers its slot, so a mismatch is paid for in cropping.
Fill the slots and then trade them around. Drop every photograph in at once so they land in reading order, then drag one slot onto another to swap the two pictures until the order reads the way you want.
Reframe inside the slots. Tap a slot to pick it up, drag the picture inside it to choose what shows, and pinch or scroll to zoom. Double-tap to put the framing back where it started.
Set the gap and the ground last. A gap of zero makes one continuous picture; a gap with a pale ground makes a set of separate ones. Choose it after the pictures are in, when you can see what it does.

What no layout will fix

Two photographs that are almost the same picture will look like a mistake in any arrangement, and no gap, ground or corner radius will rescue them. The same goes for a picture with writing in it placed in a small slot: at 344 pixels across, text is texture. Both problems are solved by using fewer photographs, which is the advice nobody wants and the one that works.

And one thing this tool genuinely cannot do: the slots do not move. If you find yourself wishing the third cell were a bit wider, no layout here will oblige, and what you are looking for is a tool where you place each picture yourself rather than one built around ready-made arrangements.