Make a Christmas photo collage

Card sizes that a print shop will accept, with room for a greeting.

The details

How it works

1. Add the photos for the card.
2. Pick a layout and type the greeting.
3. Export as a PDF at 5 × 7 with bleed, or as a JPG for a message.

A Christmas photo card is a print job with a deadline, and the two things that go wrong are both avoidable. The first is size: cards are ordered at a fixed physical size, usually 5 × 7 inches or A6, and a collage made at a social ratio has to be cropped to fit, which is how a face ends up half off the edge. Starting from the card size means the layout is solved for that shape from the beginning.

The second is bleed. Most card printers ask for 3 millimetres of image past the trim line, because the cutting is not perfectly aligned, and a design without bleed can come back with a thin white strip down one side. The PDF export here adds bleed and crop marks on request, at the exact physical size, which is what a print shop expects to receive.

For the collage itself, three to six photos is the range that works on a card. A 5 × 7 divided six ways gives each photo about 2 × 2 inches, which is enough to recognise a face across a mantelpiece; divided twelve ways it is not. If you want more photos than that, the sensible move is a larger print rather than smaller cells.

Greetings go over the collage rather than into it, so adding one crops nothing. There are presets for a greeting on a pill, a script line and a stacked two-line arrangement, all of which can be moved and recoloured. If the card is being posted digitally instead, a square or 4:5 export is one click away and the arrangement is re-solved rather than squashed.

As everywhere else on this site, the photos never leave your device, and the exported file carries no metadata — which matters more than usual for a card that will be handed to people, since a JPG straight from a phone would otherwise carry the location it was taken in.

Questions