Make a 2 photo collage

14 arrangements built for exactly 2 photos. Add yours and they all re-draw.

The details

How it works

1. Add your 2 photos. They stay on your device.
2. Pick from the 14 arrangements built for 2 photos.
3. Adjust anything you like, then download in full quality.

Two photographs is the smallest collage that is still a collage, and it is almost always a comparison — a before and an after, two people, the same place in two seasons. That changes what a good layout is. With two cells the only real decisions are which way the split runs and whether the two halves are equal, and equal is usually right, because unequal halves imply that one photograph matters more and a comparison is not making that claim.

Which way to split is worth thinking about rather than accepting. A vertical divider, side by side, suits differences in height or posture, because the eye can travel across at a constant level. A horizontal one, stacked, suits differences in width, and on a phone it gives each photograph more pixels: a 4:5 canvas cut horizontally gives two cells of 1080 by 675, against 540 by 1350 the other way. Setting the divider to zero makes the pair read as one continuous image, which is worth trying when both photographs share a horizon. The other decision worth making deliberately is whether both halves get the same crop. Two photographs taken from slightly different distances look mismatched even in identical cells, and matching the crop across both is usually what makes a pair look like a pair rather than two pictures that happen to be adjacent.

Whichever arrangement suits them, your 2 photographs will not all be the same shape, and that is the part most collage tools handle badly. Put 2 photographs of mixed proportions into 2 identical cells and something has to be cropped away, and the something is chosen for you. Here each of the 2 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 2 rather than concentrated on whichever one fits worst. That is why this page offers 14 arrangements for 2 photographs rather than three: they are genuinely different divisions of the canvas, and which of them wins depends on which 2 you added. Add them and every thumbnail on this page redraws itself using your own 2.

Square 1080 × 1080 is the size worth starting from, because two halves of a square are each a 1:2 rectangle, which suits a standing person. Changing it later re-solves the arrangement of all 2 for the new shape rather than stretching the version you had. Printing is where the count starts to bite: 2 photographs divide the paper 2 ways, so each is shown at roughly 50% of the area, and one that looked fine on a phone can be soft as one of 2 on an 8 by 10. The editor works out the effective resolution of each of the 2 at the size you chose and says so before you export, which is the moment that information is still useful.

Questions