Make a 4 photo collage

31 arrangements built for exactly 4 photos. Add yours and they all re-draw.

The details

How it works

1. Add your 4 photos. They stay on your device.
2. Pick from the 31 arrangements built for 4 photos.
3. Adjust anything you like, then download in full quality.

Four is the count where the obvious answer is usually the right one. Two by two divides a square into four squares and a 4:5 canvas into four cells of 4:5, so if your photographs are roughly the shape of the canvas, almost nothing is cropped. That is a rare piece of luck in collage arithmetic and worth taking when it is offered.

The luck runs out when the four are mixed. One landscape among three portraits in a 2 by 2 grid loses its sides, and a grid cannot help because every cell is the same. The alternative is a row of three beneath one full-width photograph, which gives the landscape the width it needs and the portraits cells that suit them. Both arrangements are offered; which of them is ranked first depends on what you actually added.

Whichever arrangement suits them, your 4 photographs will not all be the same shape, and that is the part most collage tools handle badly. Put 4 photographs of mixed proportions into 4 identical cells and something has to be cropped away, and the something is chosen for you. Here each of the 4 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 4 rather than concentrated on whichever one fits worst. That is why this page offers 31 arrangements for 4 photographs rather than three: they are genuinely different divisions of the canvas, and which of them wins depends on which 4 you added. Add them and every thumbnail on this page redraws itself using your own 4.

Square 1080 × 1080 is the size worth starting from, because a 2 × 2 grid on a square gives four square cells, which crop nothing. Changing it later re-solves the arrangement of all 4 for the new shape rather than stretching the version you had. Printing is where the count starts to bite: 4 photographs divide the paper 4 ways, so each is shown at roughly 25% of the area, and one that looked fine on a phone can be soft as one of 4 on an 8 by 10. The editor works out the effective resolution of each of the 4 at the size you chose and says so before you export, which is the moment that information is still useful.

Questions