Make a 9 photo collage

29 arrangements built for exactly 9 photos. Add yours and they all re-draw.

The details

How it works

1. Add your 9 photos. They stay on your device.
2. Pick from the 29 arrangements built for 9 photos.
3. Adjust anything you like, then download in full quality.

Nine has a specific cultural shape: three by three, square, the classic feed grid. It is what people picture, and on a square canvas it gives nine square cells, which means every photograph is cropped to a square. That is the trade nine makes, and it is why nine works best when the photographs are portraits taken from close enough that a square crop still contains the subject.

Nine is also the practical upper limit for a collage looked at on a phone. A 1080-pixel-wide square divided three ways gives cells of 360 pixels, about a centimetre and a half on a handset. A face photographed close up survives that; a group shot taken from across a room does not. If several of your nine are wide shots, fewer photographs or a larger canvas will serve them better than a tighter grid.

Whichever arrangement suits them, your 9 photographs will not all be the same shape, and that is the part most collage tools handle badly. Put 9 photographs of mixed proportions into 9 identical cells and something has to be cropped away, and the something is chosen for you. Here each of the 9 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 9 rather than concentrated on whichever one fits worst. That is why this page offers 29 arrangements for 9 photographs rather than three: they are genuinely different divisions of the canvas, and which of them wins depends on which 9 you added. Add them and every thumbnail on this page redraws itself using your own 9.

Square 1080 × 1080 is the size worth starting from, because a 3 × 3 grid on a square gives nine square cells, the classic feed shape. Changing it later re-solves the arrangement of all 9 for the new shape rather than stretching the version you had. Printing is where the count starts to bite: 9 photographs divide the paper 9 ways, so each is shown at roughly 11% of the area, and one that looked fine on a phone can be soft as one of 9 on an 8 by 10. The editor works out the effective resolution of each of the 9 at the size you chose and says so before you export, which is the moment that information is still useful.

Questions