How to Make a Collage in Five Steps
Two minutes, start to finish. Less if you already know which photo deserves the big cell.
1. Add your photos. Drag them onto the canvas, press Add photos or paste with Ctrl+V. Up to 40 sit in the tray at once. Load six and the tool reaches for a layout that holds six, then fills it before you have touched anything else.
2. Choose a layout. 117 of them. Filter by category or by photo count so you only see arrangements that actually fit what you have. Everything you already placed carries straight over when you switch. In a hurry? The Templates tab hands you 47 finished designs instead, 30 of them already written on.
3. Set the canvas size. Decide where it is going. An Instagram feed post, a Story, a Pinterest pin or a 4 by 6 print at a genuine 300 dots per inch. Change your mind later and nothing breaks, which is worth more than it sounds.
4. Style it. Background colour, gradient, drawn pattern or a blurred photo of your own. Gap, margin, rounding, border, shadow. Cut every photo to a heart or an arch. Twelve filters across the lot, overridable one photo at a time. Crop the one shot that was framed badly. Then text, stickers, shapes and a brush if you want to draw on it.
5. Download it. PNG, JPG or WebP at 1x through 4x. The exact pixel dimensions sit in the menu before you press anything, so nothing surprises you.
Nothing leaves your device at any point. Everything is processed here itself, nothing is uploaded to our servers.
Every Layout in the Library
117 arrangements sounds like padding until you try to make a collage from seven photos on a site that only offers grids. Then it stops sounding like padding. They come in four families and each family is good at something different.
Grids, When Order Is the Point
Thirty three of them, from a simple pair up to a 6 by 6 holding thirty six. Every cell the same size, every photo given the same weight. Democratic, tidy and completely reliable.
Reach for a grid when the photos are genuinely equal: nine shots from the same holiday, a product range, a set of before and afters. Reach for something else when one photo is obviously the best, because a grid will bury it next to the one where somebody blinked.
One Big Photo and the Rest Alongside
Twenty eight arrangements built around a single dominant frame, with the supporting cast lined up along the left, right, top or bottom. The big cell takes 62 percent of the space, which is enough to lead without swallowing everything.
This is the family most people should be using and almost nobody does. Your best photo gets the room it earned. The other six become context rather than competition. The tool always asks for the big cell first, so the hero lands in the right place without you thinking about it.
Masonry, for the Corkboard Look
Twenty eight patterns with uneven columns or rows, so one column holds two photos while its neighbour holds four. The result has a rhythm to it, less like a spreadsheet and more like photos pinned to a wall over time.
Masonry is also where the awkward numbers live. Eleven photos, thirteen, seventeen. Grids cannot produce those without leaving a hole, so most collage sites quietly make you drop one or add a filler.
The Shaped Ones
Twenty eight hand placed arrangements that no generator would produce. The Pinwheel turns four photos around a small fifth in the middle. The Triptych puts a wide centre between two narrow columns, which is how galleries have hung three pictures for centuries. Framed Hero surrounds one large photo with a border of small ones. Bookends stands two tall photos either side of a stack of three. Staircase steps down the canvas diagonally.
Plus Sign is the odd one out. It deliberately leaves the four corners empty so the collage reads as a cross shape floating on your background colour. Put something bold behind it.
Templates and What Comes With Them
A layout is a shape. A template is a decision somebody already made for you.
47 ship here, sorted into seven occasions: Everyday, Celebration, Love, Travel, Family, Work and Retro. Each carries a layout, a background, the gap and the rounding, usually with a filter on top. 30 of them go considerably further.
What a Template Puts on the Canvas
Click Birthday and you get a pink to periwinkle gradient behind the photos, wider gaps, softly rounded corners, a HAPPY BIRTHDAY bar in white on hot pink across the top, a balloon in the bottom left and a party popper in the top right. Click Noir and you get hard mono on pure black, hairline gaps, no rounding, plus the single word NOIR spaced out along the top edge. That is everything Noir does.
Your photos do not move while any of that happens. A template dresses the collage around what you have already placed, so you can try six in a row to see which one fits without losing a thing. One undo puts any of it back.
Why 17 of Them Arrive Undecorated
Contact Sheet, Product Grid, Portfolio, Property, Menu Board, Clean White and their siblings turn up with no wording and no stickers at all. Every Work template is like this, deliberately.
Balloons on a property listing would be a joke, not a template. A contact sheet earns its keep by being ruthlessly plain, because the photographs are supposed to be the only thing you look at. Add furniture to either one and you have wrecked it.
Keeping the Arrangement, Binning the Rest
Tick Layout only before you click and a template hands over its cell pattern and stops there. Background untouched, spacing untouched, filter untouched, no text and no stickers.
This is the option you want twenty minutes in, once you have got a palette exactly right and you only fancy the way Yearbook arranges its cells. Without it you would have to rebuild the colour work you just finished.
Your Edits Outrank the Template
The tool remembers which text and which stickers it put down itself, so browsing from Birthday to Wedding to Graduation swaps one set of decorations for the next instead of stacking three headlines on top of each other.
Retype HAPPY BIRTHDAY into your friend's name, though. That line stops being template furniture and becomes yours. Every template you try after that leaves it exactly where it is. Touch nothing and the tool cleans up after itself. Touch something and it keeps your version.
Grid Mode and Freeform Mode
Most collage tools pick a side. Grid sites snap everything into cells and never let go. Freestyle sites give you a blank canvas and leave you nudging photos around for twenty minutes trying to get two edges to line up.
Why the Grid Is the Right Default
A grid does the alignment for you. Gaps stay even, edges stay flush and the whole thing looks deliberate because the maths made it deliberate. For the vast majority of collages that is exactly what you want and you should never leave grid mode at all.
When to Break It Apart
Press Freeform and every photo becomes a loose layer. Drag it, resize it from any of eight handles, spin it with the rotate handle above, stack it over its neighbours.
Here is the part that matters: breaking apart does not move anything. Your collage looks identical the instant you switch, sitting exactly where the grid had put it. So you build the tidy version first, then loosen the two photos that want to be tilted, rather than starting from an empty canvas and fighting for alignment you could have had for free.
Press Grid again and the loose photos drop back into their cells. Text and stickers never move, since they float above the grid either way.
Cropping a Photo, Not Just Nudging It
These are two different jobs. The tool keeps them separate on purpose.
Dragging a photo inside its cell slides the whole picture about behind the frame. Nothing is lost. Drag it back and everything you hid comes out again. That fixes a face sitting slightly too low and it fixes nothing else.
Cropping cuts the photo itself. Press Crop this photo in that photo's own panel and the collage steps aside for a proper editor: the picture at a size you can actually see, eight handles, a rule of thirds grid over the top and the output dimensions counting up and down in pixels as you drag. Let go and the cell fills with only the part you kept. Changed your mind an hour later? Use the whole photo puts every pixel back, because the original is still sitting there untouched.
The Ratio Locks and the One Worth Learning
Free lets the box go anywhere. Original snaps it back to the file's own proportions. Then 1:1, 4:5, 3:4, 16:9 and 9:16 for when the crop has to match a platform exactly.
Fill the frame is the useful one. It locks the crop box to the exact shape of the cell this photo is going back into, so what you cut is what lands. Without it you crop a square, drop it into a tall cell and the cell quietly trims your careful work a second time. That double crop is why a face you framed perfectly comes back with the chin missing.
Drawing on a Collage by Hand
Open Doodle and the pointer turns into a pen. Circle the dog nobody noticed in the background. Scrawl an arrow at the thing you are actually pointing out. Sign the bottom corner of a card in your own handwriting, which no font will ever fake convincingly.
The ink takes any colour you like or any of the 40 gradients, so a single stroke can run pink at one end and orange at the other. Size goes from a 2 pixel hairline up to a 76 pixel marker on a 1080 canvas. The stroke is measured against the canvas rather than against your screen, so a line drawn on a phone comes out the same weight when the same collage is exported at 4x for print.
The Eraser Lifts Ink, Nothing Else
Scrub the eraser over a stroke and the stroke goes. The photograph underneath it does not so much as flicker. An eraser here can only lift ink off the sheet that ink was laid on, which means you can scribble confidently over somebody's face knowing the face is in no danger.
Everything you draw in one sitting lands on a single layer. Clear wipes the whole lot in one press. Undo walks back one complete stroke at a time rather than one twitch of your finger at a time, so you can take back a wobbly line without losing the whole scribble. Press Done and that drawing joins the stack alongside your text and stickers, so you can move it, resize it, rotate it or push it behind a photo.
What This Collage Maker Does That the Others Do Not
There are a lot of browser collage makers now. Most do the same four things: take your photos, drop them in a grid, let you pick a border colour and hand you a PNG. That is fine until you try to use the result for something.
Filters That Survive the Download
Here is the dirty secret of browser photo tools. Most apply filters as a display effect, the same way a website tints a background image. It looks great in the preview. Then Safari, which has never supported baking that effect into a canvas export, hands you a flat unfiltered file.
That is not a small audience to break for. It is most of the iPhone users who make up the bulk of everyone building collages on a phone.
Every filter here is arithmetic done on the pixels themselves. Contrast curve, saturation, split toning, grain, vignette, all calculated one pixel at a time, identically in Chrome, Firefox and Safari. What you see is what lands in your downloads folder. Test it on an iPhone if you like. We would rather you did.
Print Files at a Size a Lab Will Accept
Ask a collage site for a print file and it will proudly hand you something around 1080 pixels wide and call it high resolution. Take that to a print shop and it comes back soft, because paper needs 300 pixels for every printed inch.
Nine print presets sit in the Size tab with the sum already done. A 4 by 6 is 1800 by 1200. An 8 by 10 is 3000 by 2400. A4 is 2480 by 3508. Pick one, build, download at 1x and the file is already correct.
A Canvas You Can Change Your Mind About
Every position in the design is stored as a fraction of the canvas rather than as a pixel coordinate. Switch a finished square post to a 9:16 Story and the whole thing refits itself: cells, text, stickers, shapes, all of it.
Build once, export for the feed, the Story and a print. Most tools make you rebuild from scratch for each one, which is why most people only ever post to one.
Nothing Leaves Your Device
Not a marketing line, an architectural fact. There is no upload endpoint. Your photos are read off your disk into the page and the finished file is written back out. Watch the network tab if you are the sort of person who does that. You will see the page load and then nothing at all.
Which also means no queue at busy times, no file size limit set by somebody else, no account, no terms granting anybody a licence to your photos and nothing sitting on a server waiting to be breached.
Choosing a Canvas Size for Where You Are Posting
The ratio matters more than the pixel count. Get the shape wrong and the platform crops your collage, usually straight through somebody's face.
| Where | Ratio | Pixels | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Instagram feed, portrait | 4:5 | 1080 × 1350 | Fills the most screen as somebody scrolls |
| Instagram feed, square | 1:1 | 1080 × 1080 | Safest choice when a grid preview matters |
| Story or Reels cover | 9:16 | 1080 × 1920 | Also TikTok and WhatsApp Status |
| Pinterest pin | 2:3 | 1000 × 1500 | Tall pins take more room in a feed |
| YouTube thumbnail | 16:9 | 1280 × 720 | Shrinks to a stamp, so use few photos |
| Link preview card | 1.91:1 | 1200 × 630 | The wide card most platforms show for a shared link |
One practical rule for Stories: keep anything important away from the top and bottom fifth of the canvas. That is where the progress bar, the username and the reply box sit. They will happily cover a face.
Printing a Collage Without It Coming Out Soft
A collage on a screen is a post. A collage on paper, framed or stuck on a fridge, is a thing you keep. This is the part nearly every free collage site skips entirely.
Why 300 Is the Number
Screens show roughly 100 pixels per inch. Paper needs about 300 before your eye stops seeing the pixels. That factor of three is the whole problem.
A 1080 pixel wide file looks perfectly crisp on a phone. Printed properly it is 3.6 inches across, which is smaller than a postcard. Stretch it onto an 8 by 10 and the printer is inventing two thirds of the detail it puts on the paper. That is why your print came back looking slightly out of focus when the screen version was sharp.
Print Sizes and the Pixels They Need
| Paper | Pixels at 300 DPI | Good for |
|---|---|---|
| 4 × 6 inches | 1800 × 1200 | The cheapest print any lab sells |
| 5 × 7 inches | 2100 × 1500 | Frame shops stock this size everywhere |
| 8 × 8 inches | 2400 × 2400 | Square album pages and scrapbooks |
| 8 × 10 inches | 3000 × 2400 | Wall size, still one sheet |
| A4 | 2480 × 3508 | 210 by 297 mm, the standard in most of the world |
Pick the preset, build the collage, download at 1x. The file is already the right size. Only reach for 2x if you plan to crop into it afterwards.
Paper and Ink, Briefly
Print on actual photo paper rather than copier paper. Glossy for punch, matte if the collage is going behind glass where reflections would fight you.
Dye based inkjet ink, which most cheap home printers use, fades fastest, especially anywhere sunlight lands. Pigment based ink lasts dramatically longer and is worth seeking out if the collage is going on a wall rather than into a box. A photo lab will beat both. A 4 by 6 costs less than the ink would.
Choosing Photos That Work Together
The layout is the easy part. Which nine photos go in it is what decides whether the collage looks designed or looks like a folder.
Pick the Hero First
Before you open anything, decide which single photo is the best one. Not the one with the most people in it. The one you would send to a friend on its own.
That photo goes in the big cell of a one-big-photo layout. Everything else supports it. A collage with a clear lead reads instantly. A collage of nine equally good photos reads as nothing at all, because the eye has nowhere to land.
Cull Harder Than Feels Comfortable
Six strong photos beat twelve decent ones every time. The weak photo does not average out against the others, it drags them down, because it is the one the eye keeps catching on.
Two near identical shots from the same moment is the most common mistake. Pick one. Nobody has ever looked at a collage and wished it had a second, slightly worse version of a photo already in it.
Let One Filter Do the Reconciling
Photos from one afternoon will already agree with each other. Photos from a whole year will not: different cameras, different light, one shot under warm indoor bulbs and the next in flat daylight.
Applying a single filter across all of them pulls the whole set toward one mood and hides the mismatch. Black and White is the blunt instrument that always works, since it removes the disagreement entirely. Vintage and Soft do it more gently. Then use the per photo warmth slider on the one shot that is still fighting the rest.
Give It Room to Breathe
Edge to edge with no gap looks bold and modern. It works when the photos share a palette. A generous gap on a colour looks like prints on a mat and flatters a set that does not quite match, because the background becomes the thing holding it together.
What rarely works is a thin, mean gap in a colour that fights the photos. If you are unsure, use white or a very dark grey. Neither has ever ruined a collage.
The Phone Layout
Below roughly a tablet width the editor rearranges itself rather than shrinking. The canvas takes the screen. The tools leave the side and dock along the bottom edge as a bar you swipe sideways through, down where your thumb already rests.
Panels That Come and Go
Tap a tool and its panel rises over the canvas as a sheet. Three ways to put it back down: tap the same tool again, swipe the grey bar at its top downward or press the round cross in the corner. People reach for different ones, so all three work.
Select a photo while the sheet is down and a gold Edit button appears just above the bar. Without it you would tap a photo, find its controls hidden behind the sheet you just closed and have no obvious way back. One press and they are up.
Scroll down to read this article and the bar slides away on its own, so it is not sitting on the text for the rest of the page.
When Photos Refuse to Load
Three things go wrong and every one of them has a real fix rather than a shrug.
HEIC Files From an iPhone
This is the big one. Not one of the collage sites we compared says a word about it.
An iPhone shoots HEIC by default. Chrome and Firefox cannot decode HEIC and never have, because the format sits behind patent licensing the browser makers have not paid for. Safari 17 and later can read it. So the same photo that opens instantly on your Mac fails silently on your Windows laptop.
Two fixes. Open this page in Safari, which handles HEIC natively. Or on the iPhone go to Settings, then Camera, then Formats and choose Most Compatible, which makes it shoot JPEG from then on. Photos already taken stay HEIC, so AirDropping them to a Mac or emailing them to yourself will usually convert them on the way.
Either way this tool tells you what happened instead of failing quietly then carries on with the rest of your batch.
Very Large Photos on a Phone
Every photo gets scaled to a working copy as it comes in, which is what keeps things smooth. Even so, thirty photos from a modern camera on a five year old phone will take a moment. A 4x export will take longer still.
If the tab feels sluggish, drop the export scale to 2x or trim the tray. That is the honest trade for a tool that uses your device instead of a server. A server would be faster. A server would also have your photos.
Photos Landing Sideways
Phones do not rotate photos when you turn the handset, they set a flag in the file saying which way is up. Software that ignores the flag shows your portrait shot on its side.
This tool reads the flag on the way in, so photos should arrive upright. If one still lands wrong, the flip controls in that photo's own panel will sort it in a click.
What Happens to Your Photos and Your Location Data
Two separate things worth understanding. Most people only think about the first.
The first is where your photos go. Nowhere. There is no upload, no server-side processing and no copy kept anywhere. Close the tab and everything is gone, which is also why you should download before you leave.
The second is what is buried inside the photos themselves. Every photo your phone takes carries EXIF data: the camera model, the exact timestamp and very often the GPS coordinates of where you stood. Post an unedited photo taken in your garden and you have published your home address to anyone who cares to look.
A collage made here is written fresh from pixels rather than copied from your original files, so none of that metadata survives into the export. Your originals on your device are untouched. It is a side effect of how the rendering works rather than a feature we bolted on, which is the best kind of privacy guarantee, because there is no setting anybody can forget to switch on.
Where This Sits Next to Our Other Tools
A collage is often one step in a longer job, so here is the rest of the kit.
Need the finished collage at a specific pixel size or under a file size limit? The Image Resizer handles pixels, percentages, platform presets and exact KB targets. Want a photo strip instead of a grid? The Photobooth shoots four cut strips with your camera and prints at a true 2x6. Putting two photos next to each other for a before and after? The Side by Side Photo Maker adds labels and a divider. Merge Images joins several photos into one frame.
Posting to Instagram? The Instagram Grid Maker slices one image into profile grid tiles. The Instagram Carousel Splitter turns a wide collage into swipeable slides that line up when somebody swipes. Every one of them runs in your browser exactly like this and the full set is listed here.
For collages on your phone, CollagePhotoApp is free on iOS and Android and goes further than a browser tab can, with on-device cutouts, see-through display letters and mockup frames. If you are planning content rather than making it, start with the guide to making a collage on your phone or the Instagram Story collage walkthrough over on the blog.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this collage maker really free?
Yes. Every layout, every filter, every font and every export size costs nothing. There is no account, no trial that expires and no feature sitting behind an upgrade button. The work happens on your own device rather than on a rented server, so there is no bill to pass on and nothing to meter.
Do my photos get uploaded anywhere?
No. Everything is processed here itself, nothing is uploaded to our servers. Your photos are read straight off your disk into the page, the collage is assembled on your device and the finished file lands in your downloads folder. None of it crosses the internet.
Does the collage come out with a watermark?
Never. What downloads is your collage and nothing else. No logo in the corner, no badge across the bottom and no upgrade prompt sitting on top of your work.
Do I need to sign up or install anything?
Neither. Open the page, drop photos in and download. There is no sign-up wall, no email box and nothing to install. Closing the tab is the whole exit process.
How many photos can one collage hold?
Thirty six in a single layout, which is the 6 by 6 grid. The tray holds up to 40 at once so you have spares to swap in. Most people land somewhere between 4 and 12, which is where the layouts are thickest.
How many layouts are there?
One hundred and seventeen. They split into 33 plain grids, 28 arrangements with one dominant photo, 28 masonry patterns with uneven columns or rows and 28 shaped ones like the pinwheel, the triptych and the framed hero. Filter them by photo count to see only the ones that fit what you have.
What is the difference between a layout and a template?
A layout is pure arrangement, which is where the cells sit and how big each one is. A template is a layout with the background, spacing and filter already dialled in, so Wedding gives you a soft filter on cream paper while Noir gives you hard mono on black. There are 47 of them across seven occasions. 30 go further and arrive already written on, with the wording, the stickers and the rules laid down for you. Birthday brings a pink headline bar and two party stickers. Graduation brings a Class of line and a gold rule under it. Templates save clicks. They add no capability you could not reach yourself.
Can I take a template's layout without its colours?
Yes. Tick Layout only before you click one and the template hands over its arrangement and nothing else. Your background stays, your spacing stays, your filter stays and no text or stickers arrive. That is the option to use once you have spent ten minutes getting a palette right and you only want the cell pattern from something else.
Will trying a second template wipe the caption I typed?
No. The tool tracks which text and stickers it put down itself, so switching templates clears its own decorations and leaves yours alone. The moment you retype a template headline into somebody's name, that line becomes yours and stops being template furniture. Touch nothing and the tool tidies up after itself. Touch something and it treats it as your work. Your photos never move either way.
Can I make a collage with just 2 photos?
Yes. Four arrangements hold exactly two: side by side, stacked, plus an uneven version of each where one photo takes 64 percent and clearly leads. The uneven pair is the better choice when one shot is stronger than the other, which is most of the time. Layouts built for more photos work too, since any cell you leave empty simply shows the background.
Can I make a collage with an odd number of photos like 5, 7 or 11?
Yes. This is where most collage sites give up. Grids only produce even, tidy numbers, so five photos usually means a grid of six with a hole in it. Here the masonry and shaped families cover 5, 7, 11, 13, 14 and 17 directly, so nothing is left empty.
What happens if I load more photos than the layout holds?
The tool grows into a bigger layout that fits them and keeps everything you already placed. Nothing is thrown away. If you would rather stay on the layout you chose, the extra photos wait in the tray until you want them.
How do I swap two photos around?
Drag one onto the other. Press on a photo, pull it across into a different cell and the target lights up, then release and the two trade places. Dragging inside a cell does something different, which is moving the photo around within its own frame. Photos in the tray can be dragged too, straight onto whichever cell you want them in. The tray ticks each one once it is placed so you can see what is left.
Can I change which part of a photo shows in its cell?
Yes. Drag the photo inside its cell and it slides around behind the frame, so a face sitting too low comes up into view. The Zoom slider pushes in up to four times if the crop needs to be tighter than the cell allows.
Is cropping different from dragging the photo around in its cell?
Completely different jobs. Dragging slides the whole photo about behind the frame, so nothing is thrown away and you can drag it back. Cropping cuts the photo itself, then the cell fills with only the part you kept. Press Crop this photo in the photo's own panel and a full screen editor opens over the collage with the picture at proper size, eight handles, a rule of thirds grid and the exact output pixels shown as you drag. Whole photo undoes the cut in one press.
Can I crop to an exact shape like a square or 16:9?
Yes. The crop editor locks to 1:1, 4:5, 3:4, 16:9 or 9:16, plus Original if you want the file's own proportions back and Free if you want none of it. Fill the frame is the one worth knowing about, since it locks the box to the exact shape of the cell the photo is going into, so nothing gets trimmed a second time on the way back in.
What is the difference between Fill, Fit whole and Stretch?
Fill covers the cell completely and trims whatever hangs over the edges, which is what you want almost always. Fit whole keeps the entire photo and pads the leftover space with your border colour, useful when nothing can be cropped away. Stretch squashes the photo into the cell shape and distorts it. Fill for photos, Fit when nothing can be lost, Stretch almost never.
Can I use the same photo more than once in a collage?
Yes. Click it in the tray as many times as you like and it drops into whichever cell is selected or into the first empty one. Each copy carries its own crop, filter and shape, so the same photo can appear tight on a face in one cell and wide in another.
What is Freeform mode?
It breaks the grid apart. Every photo becomes a loose layer you can drag, resize, rotate and stack over its neighbours, which is the one thing a grid can never do. Switching to it does not move anything at first, so your collage looks identical until you start dragging.
Can I move several things at once?
Yes. Shift click to add each one to the set. Dragging a box across empty canvas sweeps up everything it touches. Ctrl+A takes the lot. After that they drag as one, nudge as one and delete as one. The panel offers six alignment buttons plus even spacing once three or more are picked. One item on its own aligns to the canvas rather than to itself, which is the quickest way to centre a caption exactly.
Does anything help me line things up?
Guides appear as you drag. A pink line shows the moment an edge or a centre lands on the canvas centre, on a canvas edge or on the edge of any other layer. The thing you are dragging is pulled gently onto it. Nothing is locked, so a small extra push carries you past a guide when you did not want it.
Can I zoom into the canvas itself?
Yes, from 50 percent up to 400 percent. The readout in the toolbar shows the actual percentage. Clicking it drops you back to 100, which is the size that fits the stage. On a 36 cell layout each photo is barely a stamp at 100 percent. Getting a face positioned properly means getting closer. The canvas scrolls once it outgrows the stage.
How do I straighten a crooked photo?
Select the cell and use the Straighten slider, which turns the photo up to 15 degrees either way inside a cell that stays exactly where it is. The photo grows a little as it turns so the corners stay covered, which is why a tilted horizon comes out level with no wedges of background showing through.
Can I copy one photo's look to all the others?
Copy style to all does it. It spreads the fit, cut shape, filter, straighten and the five adjustment sliders across every other photo in the collage. Each crop stays where you put it, since where a face sits inside its frame belongs to that photo rather than to the treatment.
What happens if I refresh the page?
Your browser asks whether you really mean it, because nothing is stored anywhere once the tab closes. That is the flip side of a tool that never uploads. If you answer yes the collage is gone, so download before you leave.
Are there keyboard shortcuts?
The question mark key lists them, as does the ? button in the toolbar. Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Shift+Z for history, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V and Ctrl+D for copying, Ctrl+A to select everything, arrows to nudge with Shift for a bigger step, Enter to type into a caption, Escape to let go of everything.
Can I get back to the grid after using Freeform?
Yes. Press Grid and your loose photos drop back into the current layout in order. Text, stickers and shapes stay exactly where you put them, since those float above the grid in both modes.
Can photos overlap each other?
In Freeform, yes. Drag one over another and it sits on top. The blue strip in the toolbar names whatever you have picked and gives you arrows to move it one step forward or back, plus buttons to send it straight to the front or the back. The Layers tab carries the same stack as a list with a grip on each row, so you can drag a photo buried under a sticker up to the top instead of hunting for it on the canvas. Text, stickers and shapes select the same way in Grid mode, since they float over the cells. Grid photos cannot overlap by design, because a grid that lets its cells collide is not really a grid.
Can I cut photos into a heart or a circle?
Yes, ten shapes in total. Square, rounded square, circle, locket oval, heart, arch, diamond, hexagon, five point star and a six petal flower. Set one shape for the whole collage from the Style tab, then overrule it on any single photo from that photo's own panel.
Why does a face get cut off by the heart shape?
Because a heart is widest across its top and narrows to a point, so anything low and central in the photo falls outside the cut. Drag the photo upward inside its cell or zoom out slightly to put more room around the face. The star is the fussiest of the ten, since it throws away everything between its points.
Which photo shape is safest for a group photo?
The square, then the rounded square, then the hexagon. All three keep the full width of the cell, which is where shoulders live. The circle and the locket trim the corners, which is exactly where the people on the ends of a group are standing.
Can I add text to my collage?
Yes, as many text boxes as you want. A new box opens with the caret already in it, so you type first and fiddle later. Double clicking any caption puts you back into it. The box grows on its own as you add lines. Twelve fonts across five families, any colour or one of 40 gradients, plus bold, italic, alignment, letter spacing, line height, a drop shadow, an outline and a highlight box behind the words. New text lands plain black with no shadow, so it reads first time. The Curve slider bends a line of text along an arc.
Why does my text look different on my phone than on my laptop?
Because the fonts come from your own device rather than being downloaded. That keeps the page fast and keeps the promise that nothing is fetched while you work, but it means a face your laptop has and your phone does not will fall back to the next one in the list. Clean, Book and Typewriter resolve almost everywhere.
Can I put my own background photo behind the collage?
Yes. Open Background in the rail down the left, then pick Photo. Blur it and darken it with the two sliders underneath so the collage on top stays readable. A blurred, dimmed version of one of your own photos is the quickest way to make a collage look designed rather than assembled.
What backgrounds can I choose from?
Sixty solid colours plus a hex box and a colour picker, 40 named gradients with an adjustable angle, 12 drawn patterns like dots, stripes, hearts and confetti in any two colours you like. Every gradient tray also carries two pickers, so you can mix a pair nobody else has. A photo of your own works too. The patterns are drawn rather than loaded, so they stay sharp at any export size.
Can I change the gap between photos?
Yes, plus the outer margin separately. Push the gap to zero and the photos sit edge to edge with no seam at all. Push both up and each photo floats on your background like a print on a mat. Edge to edge and Even spacing are one click each if you do not want to fiddle.
What do the filters do?
Twelve in the list, counting Original for when you want none of it. The other eleven cover clean black and white, hard noir, warm vintage, pushed film grain, a blown out Y2K fade, golden hour, cinematic teal and orange, 90s disposable, soft, cool and warm. Set one across every photo from the Style tab, then overrule it on any single photo. Grain and vignette sliders sit on top and work across the whole collage rather than each photo.
Will the filter survive the download?
Yes, on every browser including Safari on iPhone. Each filter is calculated pixel by pixel rather than layered on with a display effect, so the file you download is the picture you were looking at. Plenty of collage sites apply a display-only filter and hand you a flat, unfiltered file on iOS.
Can I adjust one photo without touching the others?
Yes. Click any photo and its own panel opens with brightness, contrast, saturation, warmth and blur, plus its own filter, shape and crop. That is the fix for the one photo in the set that was shot in a darker room than the rest.
Can I add stickers and shapes?
Yes. One hundred and twelve stickers across hearts, faces, party, nature, travel, food, symbols and everyday life, plus twelve drawable shapes covering rectangles, circles, triangles, stars, hearts, arrows, lines, speech bubbles and a blob. Fill any shape with a colour or a gradient and put an outline on it.
Can I draw on the collage by hand?
Yes. Open Doodle and the pointer becomes a pen. Circle the dog nobody spotted, scribble an arrow at the thing you are pointing out, sign the corner of a card. The stroke lands in any colour you like or in one of the 40 gradients, so a line can run pink to orange along its length. Size runs from a 2 pixel hairline up to a 76 pixel marker on a 1080 canvas. It scales with the canvas rather than with the screen you drew it on, so a doodle made on a phone exports at the same weight from a laptop.
Does the eraser rub out the photo underneath?
No. That is the whole point of it. An eraser only lifts ink off the sheet it was drawn on, so scrubbing over a stroke removes the stroke and leaves the photograph completely untouched. Everything you draw in one sitting stays on one layer, which means Clear wipes the lot in a press and undo walks back a stroke at a time. Press Done and the layer sits in the stack with the text and the stickers, ready to be moved, resized or shoved behind a photo.
What size should I make a collage for Instagram?
1080 by 1350 for a feed post, which is the 4:5 ratio that fills the most screen as somebody scrolls. 1080 by 1080 if you want a square. 1080 by 1920 for a Story or a Reels cover. All three are one click in the Size tab.
Can I change the canvas size after I have built the collage?
Yes. This one is worth knowing about. Every position is stored as a fraction of the canvas rather than as a pixel, so switching a square post to a 9:16 Story refits the whole design instead of pushing half of it off the edge. Build once, export for three platforms.
What size should I make a collage for printing?
Multiply the printed inches by 300. A 4 by 6 print wants 1800 by 1200 pixels, a 5 by 7 wants 2100 by 1500 and an 8 by 10 wants 3000 by 2400. All of those sit in the Size tab under Print, already correct, so you never have to do the sum.
Why does my printed collage look soft when it looked sharp on screen?
Because a screen shows roughly 100 pixels per inch and a print needs 300. A 1080 pixel wide file that looks crisp on a phone is only 3.6 inches wide at print quality, so stretching it to 8 inches means the printer is inventing two thirds of the detail. Start from a print preset instead of scaling a social one up.
What does the export scale do?
It multiplies the canvas. A 1080 square at 2x downloads as 2160 pixels, at 4x as 4320. Use 1x for a quick share, 2x for anything that will be looked at closely and 3x or 4x when you are printing. The exact pixel size is shown inside the Download menu before you press anything.
Which file format should I pick?
PNG when the collage has text, sharp edges or a flat colour background, since it keeps everything crisp. JPG when it is mostly photographs and you want a smaller file. WebP when you want the smallest file of the three at the same quality, which every current browser and phone can open.
Why did my export come out smaller than I asked for?
There is a ceiling of 12,000 pixels on the longest edge. Ask for A4 at 4x and the raw request would be over 14,000 pixels, which is enough to crash a browser tab on most phones. Rather than fail, the export scales back to the ceiling and says so in the Download menu.
Why will my iPhone photos not load?
Almost certainly because they are HEIC files, which is what an iPhone shoots by default. Chrome and Firefox cannot decode HEIC at all and never have, because the format sits behind patent licensing that browser makers have not paid for. Safari 17 and later can read them. Either open this page in Safari or set Settings, Camera, Formats to Most Compatible on your iPhone so it shoots JPEG from then on.
What happens when I try to load a HEIC file here?
The tool spots it by name and says so plainly, then carries on with the rest of your batch. It does not fail silently, which is what nearly every other collage site does, leaving you clicking the same file over and over wondering what you did wrong.
Why did the tool slow down with lots of big photos?
Because your device is doing the work rather than a server. Every photo is scaled down to a working copy on the way in, which keeps normal use smooth, but 30 or more photos on an older phone will still take a moment and a 4x export will take longer than a 1x. That is the trade for nothing being uploaded.
Do my photos arrive sideways?
They should not. Photos shot on a phone carry an orientation flag rather than being physically rotated. The tool reads that flag on the way in, so a portrait photo arrives upright. If one still lands wrong, the flip controls in its own panel will sort it.
Does making a collage here strip the EXIF and GPS data?
Yes. The collage is written fresh from pixels rather than copied from the original files, so camera model, timestamps and GPS coordinates from your source photos do not survive into the export. Your originals on your device are untouched. That matters if you are posting a photo taken at home.
Can I undo a mistake?
Yes, up to 60 steps back, with Ctrl+Z or the arrow in the toolbar. A whole slider drag counts as one step rather than a hundred, so undoing after you have dragged the gap slider around puts it back where it started instead of walking it back one notch at a time.
Can I save a collage and come back to it later?
No. Nothing is stored anywhere by us, so closing the tab clears everything. Download before you leave. If you still have the source photos, loading them again with the same settings produces an identical collage.
Does this work on a phone?
Yes, on iPhone and Android, in Safari and Chrome. Below roughly a tablet width the whole editor rearranges itself: the canvas takes the screen and the tools dock to the bottom edge as a bar you swipe along, the way a phone app does it. Every control is sized for a thumb. Big batches take a little longer on a phone than on a laptop, because your device does the work instead of a server.
Where did the tool panel go on my phone?
It became a sheet. Tap any tool in the bottom bar and the panel slides up over the canvas, then goes away again when you are done with it. Three ways to put it down: swipe the grey bar at its top downward, press the round cross in its corner or tap the same tool a second time. Pick a photo on the canvas while the sheet is down and a gold Edit button appears just above the bar, so the controls for whatever you just tapped are never more than one press away.
Can I use my collages commercially?
Yes. We claim nothing over what you make. The layouts, patterns and shapes are generated by the tool rather than licensed from a stock library, so there is nothing to attribute. Just make sure you have the right to use the photos you put in, which is between you and whoever took them.
Does it work offline?
Once the page has loaded, yes. The editing, filtering and downloading all happen on your device with no further network use, so a collapsing wifi connection mid session does not cost you anything. You will need a connection to load the page in the first place.
What is the difference between this and the CollagePhotoApp mobile app?
This tool runs in a browser tab and needs no install, which suits a laptop and a quick job. The app is built for a phone and goes further, with on-device cutouts that lift a person off their background, see-through display letters, mockup frames and text that follows a path you draw. Both are free and neither watermarks your work.