Make a 6 photo collage

34 arrangements built for exactly 6 photos. Add yours and they all re-draw.

The details

How it works

1. Add your 6 photos. They stay on your device.
2. Pick from the 34 arrangements built for 6 photos.
3. Adjust anything you like, then download in full quality.

Six divides well, which makes it one of the easier counts to work with and one of the easier ones to make dull. Two by three and three by two are both available, and on a 4:5 canvas the three-by-two version gives cells close to 4:5 themselves, so portraits sit in it almost uncropped. That is the arrangement most six-photo collages end up using, and rightly.

The risk with six even cells is that nothing leads, and a collage where nothing leads is a contact sheet. If one of the six is the photograph, the arrangements that give it a double-width cell in the top row are worth trying: six is large enough that one cell can be twice the size of the others without the rest becoming too small to read.

Whichever arrangement suits them, your 6 photographs will not all be the same shape, and that is the part most collage tools handle badly. Put 6 photographs of mixed proportions into 6 identical cells and something has to be cropped away, and the something is chosen for you. Here each of the 6 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 6 rather than concentrated on whichever one fits worst. That is why this page offers 34 arrangements for 6 photographs rather than three: they are genuinely different divisions of the canvas, and which of them wins depends on which 6 you added. Add them and every thumbnail on this page redraws itself using your own 6.

Portrait 1080 × 1350 is the size worth starting from, because a 3 × 2 grid on 4:5 gives cells close to 4:5 themselves. Changing it later re-solves the arrangement of all 6 for the new shape rather than stretching the version you had. Printing is where the count starts to bite: 6 photographs divide the paper 6 ways, so each is shown at roughly 17% of the area, and one that looked fine on a phone can be soft as one of 6 on an 8 by 10. The editor works out the effective resolution of each of the 6 at the size you chose and says so before you export, which is the moment that information is still useful.

Questions