Photo collage

The collage is sized from your best photo

This is the thing most collage tools get wrong, and it is worth knowing what to look for.

If you combine a 4000 px photo with a 400 px thumbnail, a naive tool picks an output size from the first photo, or from the smallest, and everything else is scaled down to match. The 4000 px photo is thrown away and you cannot get it back from the result.

Here each photo asks for the canvas size that would let it fill its own slot without being enlarged, and the largest of those requests wins. A collage containing one good photo comes out large enough to keep it.

The consequence is that a small photo next to a large one is enlarged to fill its slot and will look softer than its neighbour. That is unavoidable with a single output image — but the page counts how many photos it happened to, and says so, rather than letting you find out at full size.

Output is capped at 4096 px on the longest edge. Beyond that, browsers start failing to allocate the canvas.

Photos are cropped, never stretched

A slot has whatever shape the layout gives it and your photo has its own. One of them has to give.

Stretching the photo to fit is the wrong answer and it is instantly visible on faces. This takes the largest centred rectangle of your photo that matches the slot’s shape, so a panorama in a square slot keeps its full height and loses its edges, and a tall portrait keeps its full width and loses some sky.

If you need a different part of the photo kept, crop it before you bring it here.

Layouts

Layouts appear only when they match the number of photos you have chosen — two, three, four, six or nine. The list is short on purpose: six good arrangements are more useful than every possible subdivision of a rectangle.

Shape sets the proportions of the finished image. Square for a feed, 4:5 for a portrait post — the shape that occupies the most screen on a phone — and 3:2 for something closer to a photograph.

Gap and border are percentages of the shorter edge rather than pixel values, so the proportions hold whatever resolution the collage ends up at. A gap set on a preview will look the same in a 4096 px export.

Order

Photos fill the slots in the order they are listed, reading left to right and top to bottom. Use the arrows to move one earlier or later, or remove it entirely — removing one changes how many photos you have, so the layouts on offer change with it.

Your photos stay here

Every photo is decoded, cropped and drawn inside this page. Nothing is uploaded, and the finished collage is assembled on your own machine.