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 strip 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.
Four taps to a collage
One — take a layout
The strip across the top is the picker. The number under each chip is how many photos it holds, and the chip itself is drawn from the same rectangles the canvas will use, in whatever shape the collage is currently set to. What you see on the chip is what you get.
Two — fill the slots
Drop a handful of photos onto the canvas and they land in reading order. Tap one empty slot and you get a picker for that slot alone. A screenshot on the clipboard can be pasted straight in. If the order is wrong, drag one slot onto another and the two pictures trade places — which is the thing everyone reaches for, so it is the thing the drag does.
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.
Four — set the edges and save
The rail holds four things and no more: the space between slots, the space around the outside, how rounded the corners are, and what colour shows through. Leave the ground set to none and the collage saves as a PNG with the gaps see-through; pick any colour and it saves as a JPG. The button says the pixel size next to it so there is never a question about what you are about to get.
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.
Twelve photos is the ceiling and every one of them is reduced to a working copy the moment it opens, because holding twelve full-size decodes is how a phone tab gets killed mid-collage. 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
- You cannot move a slot. The rectangles are the template, and nothing in the rail will stretch one, shift one or delete one. That is the deal a template-led tool makes: you give up arranging in exchange for being finished in forty seconds. When the arrangement is the interesting part of the job, this is the wrong tool and no amount of copy will make it the right one.
- A finished collage cannot be opened here again. There is no project file and nothing is remembered between visits — close the tab and the arrangement is gone, even though the photos on your device are untouched. Changing one picture tomorrow means rebuilding the collage, which takes about as long as it did the first time but is still a real cost worth knowing about before you start.
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. That is deliberate rather than clever: a layout that silently rearranged itself when you were one photo short would be a different layout from the one on the chip you tapped. If you want the gaps gone, pick a four-slot layout — your photos move across in the order they are already in, and any framing you have done to them comes with them.
- Can I drag a slot to make it bigger, or move one out of the way?
- No, and that is the trade this tool makes. The slot rectangles are the template, so the moment you tap a layout you know exactly what you are getting and there is nothing left to fiddle with. It is what makes the whole thing take forty seconds. If the arrangement is the part you want to control, you want a tool built the other way round, where you place each picture yourself on an open canvas.
- 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 layout here carries a separate map for each of the three shapes, ninety in all, so changing shape re-lays the collage rather than stretching it.
- 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 of the three sizes 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 rail 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.
Captions, stickers, filters and decorative frames are all deliberately absent. Each of those is somebody else’s whole job, and a collage tool that grew four of them would be slower at the one thing it is for.
What the choice of ground costs you in file size
There is no format menu here, and that is on purpose: the ground colour decides it. 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, which only PNG can do — and a PNG of nine photographs is a lossless encode of nine photographs, which is heavy.
| 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 rail 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.