Make a 3 photo collage

22 arrangements built for exactly 3 photos. Add yours and they all re-draw.

The details

How it works

1. Add your 3 photos. They stay on your device.
2. Pick from the 22 arrangements built for 3 photos.
3. Adjust anything you like, then download in full quality.

Three is the first count with a genuine choice of shape, and the three options look quite different. A row of three gives each photograph a narrow, tall cell. A column of three gives wide, short ones. One photograph above two, or beside two, gives the first one prominence. Which reads best depends almost entirely on whether your three are portrait or landscape, which is why the arrangements offered here change once you have added them.

Three also suits a sequence, and sequences have a direction. If the photographs are steps of something — a recipe, a build, a journey — a row keeps the order unambiguous, because people read across before they read down. If they are three views of one subject, the hero arrangement says so more clearly than a row does, by making one of them the subject and the other two the context.

Whichever arrangement suits them, your 3 photographs will not all be the same shape, and that is the part most collage tools handle badly. Put 3 photographs of mixed proportions into 3 identical cells and something has to be cropped away, and the something is chosen for you. Here each of the 3 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 3 rather than concentrated on whichever one fits worst. That is why this page offers 22 arrangements for 3 photographs rather than three: they are genuinely different divisions of the canvas, and which of them wins depends on which 3 you added. Add them and every thumbnail on this page redraws itself using your own 3.

Portrait 1080 × 1350 is the size worth starting from, because a 4:5 canvas fits one landscape above two portraits almost exactly. Changing it later re-solves the arrangement of all 3 for the new shape rather than stretching the version you had. Printing is where the count starts to bite: 3 photographs divide the paper 3 ways, so each is shown at roughly 33% of the area, and one that looked fine on a phone can be soft as one of 3 on an 8 by 10. The editor works out the effective resolution of each of the 3 at the size you chose and says so before you export, which is the moment that information is still useful.

Questions