Make a 12 photo collage

24 arrangements built for exactly 12 photos. Add yours and they all re-draw.

The details

How it works

1. Add your 12 photos. They stay on your device.
2. Pick from the 24 arrangements built for 12 photos.
3. Adjust anything you like, then download in full quality.

Twelve is a calendar number, and most twelve-photo collages are a year — one photograph a month, in order. That gives the arrangement a constraint the other counts do not have: the order matters, so an arrangement that reads out of sequence is wrong even if it looks better. Three by four read across, or four by three read down, both preserve it.

Twelve is also the point where printing becomes the sensible destination. On a phone, twelve cells are too small to look at; on A4 at 300 DPI, each cell is roughly 70 by 85 millimetres, which is about the size of a passport photograph and perfectly readable in the hand. If the photographs carry capture times, ordering them by date takes one step and saves the fiddling.

Whichever arrangement suits them, your 12 photographs will not all be the same shape, and that is the part most collage tools handle badly. Put 12 photographs of mixed proportions into 12 identical cells and something has to be cropped away, and the something is chosen for you. Here each of the 12 cells is derived from the proportions of the photograph going into it, so a tall photograph gets a tall cell, and the cropping that remains is spread across all 12 rather than concentrated on whichever one fits worst. That is why this page offers 24 arrangements for 12 photographs rather than three: they are genuinely different divisions of the canvas, and which of them wins depends on which 12 you added. Add them and every thumbnail on this page redraws itself using your own 12.

A4 at 300 DPI is the size worth starting from, because a 3 × 4 grid on A4 leaves room for a title and prints without cropping. Changing it later re-solves the arrangement of all 12 for the new shape rather than stretching the version you had. Printing is where the count starts to bite: 12 photographs divide the paper 12 ways, so each is shown at roughly 8% of the area, and one that looked fine on a phone can be soft as one of 12 on an 8 by 10. The editor works out the effective resolution of each of the 12 at the size you chose and says so before you export, which is the moment that information is still useful.

Questions