Make a 20 photo collage

18 arrangements built for exactly 20 photos. Add yours and they all re-draw.

The details

How it works

1. Add your 20 photos. They stay on your device.
2. Pick from the 18 arrangements built for 20 photos.
3. Adjust anything you like, then download in full quality.

Twenty is past the point where a grid helps. Four by five gives twenty equal cells, each one five per cent of the canvas, and twenty things of equal size is a pattern rather than a set of photographs. What works at this count is justified rows — rows of unequal length, where a good photograph can be twice the width of its neighbour — which is the arrangement a magazine uses for the same reason.

At twenty the destination is almost always print or a large screen. On an 8 by 10 inch print each photograph gets about two inches, which is enough to recognise a face held at reading distance but not across a room; A3 roughly doubles that. It is also the count where source resolution starts to matter in the other direction: twenty photographs at 1200 pixels each is plenty, because none of them is shown large.

Whichever arrangement suits them, your 20 photographs will not all be the same shape, and that is the part most collage tools handle badly. Put 20 photographs of mixed proportions into 20 identical cells and something has to be cropped away, and the something is chosen for you. Here each of the 20 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 20 rather than concentrated on whichever one fits worst. That is why this page offers 18 arrangements for 20 photographs rather than three: they are genuinely different divisions of the canvas, and which of them wins depends on which 20 you added. Add them and every thumbnail on this page redraws itself using your own 20.

8 × 10 inches at 300 DPI is the size worth starting from, because twenty cells on 8 × 10 are each about 2 × 2 inches, which is still recognisable in a frame. Changing it later re-solves the arrangement of all 20 for the new shape rather than stretching the version you had. Printing is where the count starts to bite: 20 photographs divide the paper 20 ways, so each is shown at roughly 5% of the area, and one that looked fine on a phone can be soft as one of 20 on an 8 by 10. The editor works out the effective resolution of each of the 20 at the size you chose and says so before you export, which is the moment that information is still useful.

Questions