Creating Photo Collages

It feels like images are ruling the interwebz these days. Between hot image-based social networks like Pinterest, Tumblr and Instagram, and how much Facebook’s Edgerank loves photos, images are becoming more and more important for telling visual stories all the time.

But sometimes one picture is not enough. Sometimes a story needs to be told with a series of images, creating a collage.

A story-collage I recently made after taking a macaron-making workshop.

There are lots of good apps out there that allow you to do this. It’s a bit time-consuming, though, as creating a photo collage usually requires multiple steps, and running your images though multiple apps. You’ll start by taking a series of photos on your phone’s camera, and saving them to your camera roll. Next, you’ll run the photos through one of the apps below, in which you’ll create a single image from a few of the photos you just took. Finally, I usually run my final, finished collage image through an Instagram filter, and publish it to my feeds from there. The end result can be really eye-catching.

Here are my faves:

PicFrame: Easy to use interface, and was recently updated to give you tons and tons of options in terms of frame possibilities. After you set up your image how you want it to be, you can centre it and adjust the frames’ colours or patterns. You can also put a little note on there giving the image a name. Finally, you can send your finished image to your email, text, FB, Twitter, Instagram, etc. $0.99 and available for iPhone and Android.

Diptic: Does all the things that PicFrame does, plus lots more extras that I really like. You can actually drag and adjust the frames to make them bigger and smaller. As well, you can adjust the colour, brightness, and saturation of each of the individual photos in your collage, or you can filter each one individually, similar to Instagram. There aren’t as many fancy borders, but that’s not really a big thing for me, as I’ll basically use white and black. This is a great app, my favorite of the two, and is available for iPhone and Android, also priced at $0.99.

I want to give a quick honorable mention to Pixlr-o-Matic, which is a sweet little Instagram-like app, but can’t do multiple-image collages. It has a lot more features than Instagram, but of course lacks the community that Instagram has.

Check out this blog post that lists lots of other multiple-photo apps.