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 is entirely the second kind, which is why the layout strip is the first thing you see and why nothing in the rail will let you stretch a slot. Thirty arrangements, each drawn three times for the three shapes you can save in, is ninety authored layouts — and the reason for drawing rather than deriving them is that automatic reflow into a tall frame looks obviously automatic.

There is no text, no stickers, no filters and no decorative frames. Each of those is a serious job in its own right, and a collage tool that grew four half-versions of them would be slower and worse at the one thing it is for. The same applies at the other end: past twelve pictures you are not filling a template any more, and a fixed arrangement stops being a help.

Nothing is saved between visits either. There is no account, no draft and no history, so a closed tab is a finished session. That is a real cost and it is written on the homepage rather than hidden here.

It is made by a small team who build single-purpose picture tools, one site per job. That is the whole business model: a page that does one thing well, costs nothing to use, and is meant to be paid for by Google ad units sitting in the reading matter under the tool rather than wrapped around it. That part has not begun — the domain is still waiting on AdSense, so nothing of the kind is drawn today. Nobody is asked to sign up for anything either, 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.