Photo Collage Maker

No. They are read, arranged and rendered entirely in your browser, and no part of them is transmitted. There is no file size limit and no cap on how many you can use, because there is no server doing the work — your own machine is. Closing the tab is the end of it.

No, and there is no sign-up, no account and no trial. The collage you download is the collage, at the full resolution you chose.

Yes, and it is worth understanding why most collage makers cannot. Photographs of different shapes cannot fill a tidy grid without something being cut off — that is geometry, not a limitation of the software. Grid layouts crop, and most tools do it silently, which is why people find a face missing from the edge of a cell with no idea what happened. Justified rows and masonry columns solve it the other way: they let the arrangement bend so every photo keeps its own proportions. Nothing is cropped, and the price is that the cells are no longer all the same size.

The actual arrangement. Each icon is generated by running that layout over a set of stand-in photographs of mixed shapes, so the diagram is produced by the same code that produces your collage — it cannot end up illustrating an arrangement the tool no longer makes, which is what happens to icon sets drawn by hand and maintained separately. The stand-ins are deliberately a mix of landscape, portrait and square, because a layout only shows its character when the shapes disagree.

Ready-made combinations of the spacing and framing settings: Clean, Seamless, Cards, Polaroid, Poster, Film, Tight and Soft. They exist because those settings interact rather than being independent — a shadow needs a gap to fall into, a thick border wants a background that suits it, and heavy rounding needs spacing or the corners collide. Reaching a coherent look by moving four sliders separately takes longer than it should. Adjust any slider afterwards and the preset simply stops being highlighted, because it would be claiming to describe a collage that has moved on.

Both keep every photo whole; they just choose a different thing to hold constant. Justified rows fill each row to a common height and stretch it to meet both edges, which is the layout Flickr and Google Photos use — it reads left to right and every row lines up. Masonry fixes the column width instead and lets each column run to whatever depth its photos need, which is the Pinterest look. Rows suit a mix of landscape and portrait; columns suit mostly-portrait sets.

On Automatic it tries every column count and picks whichever makes the cells closest to square on your chosen canvas, with a small penalty for leaving a ragged last row. Square-ish cells crop the least from ordinary photographs. You can override it if you want a specific arrangement — a 3×3 grid, or a single row.

It is centred rather than pushed to the left. A left-aligned short row reads as a photo having gone missing off the end; a centred one reads as deliberate. In justified rows the final row keeps its natural height instead of being stretched to fill the width, which would otherwise blow up two leftover photos to an absurd size.

For Instagram: 1080×1080 square, 1080×1350 portrait — the largest the feed allows and therefore the sharpest — or 1080×1920 for a story or reel. For printing: A4 at 2480×3508 or a 6×4 photo at 1800×1200, both 300 dpi. For a presentation or a wallpaper, 1920×1080. If in doubt the square is safe almost everywhere.

Only as much as the format you save in costs. The photos are drawn at the output resolution rather than being shrunk and enlarged again, and the preview never touches the file — it is the same layout drawn smaller so the sliders stay responsive, while the export renders from scratch at full size. Save as PNG if you want no compression at all, at the cost of a much larger file. For ordinary photographs JPG at 92% is indistinguishable.

Drag any photo onto another to swap their places, or use the arrows under each thumbnail. There is also a shuffle, which is genuinely useful on the justified and masonry layouts — the arrangement depends on the order, so shuffling is the quickest way to find a mix that sits well.

Yes — choose the Filmstrip layout, which puts everything in a single row, or tick Stack vertically for a column. With two photos and the gap set to zero you get a clean split down the middle.

A shadow needs somewhere to fall. If the gap between photos is very small the shadow lands underneath the neighbouring photo and is covered. Raise the spacing to about ten pixels or more and it will appear; the tool says so when the two settings are fighting.

There is no limit imposed. The practical one is memory and legibility: forty photographs on a 1080-pixel square leaves each one about the size of a postage stamp. If you are making a large photo wall, raise the canvas size along with the count.