Make a 5 photo collage

27 arrangements built for exactly 5 photos. Add yours and they all re-draw.

The details

How it works

1. Add your 5 photos. They stay on your device.
2. Pick from the 27 arrangements built for 5 photos.
3. Adjust anything you like, then download in full quality.

Five is where grids stop working and people notice. There is no rectangle of five, so any attempt at one leaves a hole or a double-width cell, and a hole reads as a mistake rather than as a decision. The arrangements that work instead all accept the asymmetry: one photograph given the top two thirds with four beneath it, or one down the left with four stacked beside it.

That asymmetry is an opportunity rather than a compromise. Five photographs usually are not equally important — there is a best one — and a layout that gives it two thirds of the frame says so. If none of the five stands out, a row of two above a row of three is the closest five gets to an even grid, and it looks intentional in a way that a four-plus-a-gap never does.

Whichever arrangement suits them, your 5 photographs will not all be the same shape, and that is the part most collage tools handle badly. Put 5 photographs of mixed proportions into 5 identical cells and something has to be cropped away, and the something is chosen for you. Here each of the 5 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 5 rather than concentrated on whichever one fits worst. That is why this page offers 27 arrangements for 5 photographs rather than three: they are genuinely different divisions of the canvas, and which of them wins depends on which 5 you added. Add them and every thumbnail on this page redraws itself using your own 5.

Portrait 1080 × 1350 is the size worth starting from, because five does not divide into a rectangle, so a hero and a strip of four reads better than a gap. Changing it later re-solves the arrangement of all 5 for the new shape rather than stretching the version you had. Printing is where the count starts to bite: 5 photographs divide the paper 5 ways, so each is shown at roughly 20% of the area, and one that looked fine on a phone can be soft as one of 5 on an 8 by 10. The editor works out the effective resolution of each of the 5 at the size you chose and says so before you export, which is the moment that information is still useful.

Questions