Make a birthday photo collage
Templates with a place for the name and the number, ready for your photos.
Drop photos here, or paste from your clipboard
Examples
- A birthday collage with one large photo and four below it
- A nine photo birthday collage in a square grid
- A thirty photo birthday collage arranged in rows
- A birthday collage sized for a story with the name at the top
- A birthday collage laid out for a 5 by 7 print
- A birthday collage in the scrapbook style with tape and doodles
The details
| Templates | 8 birthday layouts — 5 to 20 photos |
|---|---|
| Text presets | Happy Birthday stack, age number, date stamp |
| Best post size | 1080 × 1350 — 4:5, the tallest Instagram allows in a feed |
| Best story size | 1080 × 1920 — keep the name clear of the top and bottom 310 px |
| Print size that suits a card | 5 × 7 inches at 300 DPI — 1500 × 2100 px |
| Photos per year of age | one — a common shape: 30 photos for a 30th |
How it works
- Add the photos, in any order — they can be sorted by date afterwards.
- Pick a layout and type the name or the age over it.
- Download for a post, a story or a print.
A birthday collage has one job that a general collage does not: it has to read as being about a person on a particular day. That usually means two things beyond the photos — a name or an age somewhere in the frame, and enough space around the best photo that the eye goes there first. Both are built into the layouts on this page rather than left for you to arrange.
The photo-per-year idea is worth knowing about because it changes the shape of the thing. Thirty photos for a thirtieth birthday cannot be thirty equal squares on a phone screen; at that count each photo is about three per cent of the area and nobody can see a face. What works instead is a large photo with the rest arranged around it in rows, which is what the engine produces for counts over about twelve, and which prints far better than a grid.
If the collage is going on a card or a wall rather than a feed, start from a print size. A 5 × 7 at 300 DPI is 1500 × 2100 pixels, and each photo in a nine-photo collage at that size is shown at about 500 pixels across — which is fine for a phone photo and marginal for a screenshot. The editor shows the effective resolution of every photo before you export, so a photo that will print soft is flagged while you can still swap it.
Older photos are the usual complication. A scanned print or a photo from a 2009 phone is smaller and a different shape from what your phone takes now, and putting the two next to each other in equal cells makes the old one look worse than it is. The layout here is computed from the proportions of what you actually added, so a squarer old photo gets a squarer cell instead of being cropped to match a modern 4:3.
Nothing is uploaded. The photos are opened by this browser tab and the finished file is written straight to your device, with no watermark, no account and no metadata in the output.
Questions
How many photos should a birthday collage have?
Between five and twelve for something that will be looked at on a phone. One photo per year of age works for a print, where there is room for the faces to stay recognisable.
Can I put the person's name and age on it?
Yes. The birthday templates include a text preset for a name and a large number, and you can move, resize or recolour it. Text is added over the collage, so it never crops a photo.
What size should a birthday collage be for Instagram?
1080 × 1350 for a feed post and 1080 × 1920 for a story. Switching between them re-solves the layout for the new shape rather than stretching it, so you can export both.
Can I make it from old scanned photos?
Yes. Scans are usually a different shape and a lower resolution than phone photos, and the layout takes both into account rather than forcing them into matching cells.
Is it free, and is there a watermark?
It is free and there is no watermark, no signup and no export limit.