How to make a collage on iPhone and Android
By The CollageCreator team · Published · Last reviewed
You do not need an app
A phone browser can do everything a collage needs: open photos, decode them, arrange them and write a file. There is no capability here that requires installing anything, and a browser has one real advantage — it has no access to your photo library beyond the files you explicitly pick in the system picker.
If you want it to behave like an app, Add to Home Screen. That caches it, gives it its own icon, and lets it open without a connection.
HEIC, Live Photos and video
iPhones store photos as HEIC by default. Safari decodes HEIC natively, so they work with nothing extra; other browsers load a decoder the first time one appears, which takes a moment on the first photo and nothing thereafter.
Live Photos contribute their still frame. Videos are rejected with a message rather than a silent failure, because a video in a collage is not a thing a still image can contain.
The gestures worth knowing
Tap a cell to select it. Drag inside a selected cell to move the photo within its frame, and pinch on any cell to zoom the photo inside it. Double tap resets the crop.
To swap two photos, press and hold for about a third of a second until the photo lifts, then drag it onto another cell. Every one of these has a button in the toolbar as well, because a gesture nobody discovers is not a feature.
Saving the result
Tap Download and then Share. On iOS that opens the system share sheet, where Save Image puts the collage into Photos — this is the reliable route on iPhone, more so than a direct download.
On Android, Download saves to your Downloads folder and Share offers the same sheet. If nothing happens when you tap Download, see the next section.
In-app browsers break downloads
If you opened this from a link inside Instagram, Facebook or TikTok, you are in that app's own browser, and those frequently block file downloads. The collage will be made correctly and then fail to save, which looks like the tool is broken.
The fix is to open the page in Safari or Chrome — there is usually a menu item for exactly that. It is worth doing before you start, not after, because in-app browsers also sometimes use separate storage, so work started in one may not be there when you switch.