How to make a photo collage

By The CollageCreator team · Published 2026-09-21 · Last reviewed 2026-09-21

How many photos, and what it suits

Photos	Reads well at	Suits
2 to 3	Any size	A comparison, or a moment and its context
4 to 6	Phone screen	A post, a card, an event
7 to 12	Phone or A4	A day, a trip, a month
13 to 30	A4 or larger	A year, a wall piece, a memorial board
30 to 200	A3 or a poster	A shape collage, or an archive

Start with the size, not the photos

The single decision that saves the most work is choosing the output size first. A collage made for a square post and then re-purposed for an 8 × 10 print has to be cropped, and the crop lands wherever the arrangement happens to put it — usually through somebody at the edge. Deciding up front that this is a story, or an A4 print, means the layout is solved for that shape from the beginning.

If you genuinely need several sizes, make the collage once and switch canvas afterwards. A proper collage tool re-solves the arrangement for the new proportions rather than scaling the old one, which means the same photos rearrange themselves rather than being squashed.

Choose fewer photos than you want to

Almost every collage that does not work has too many photos in it. The arithmetic is simple: divide the canvas by the number of photos and ask whether a face at that size is recognisable. On a phone, a 4:5 post divided nine ways gives cells about a centimetre and a half across, which is fine for a portrait and hopeless for a group shot taken from across a room.

The table above is the shortcut. If the number you have is above the range for the size you picked, either go up a size or make two collages — a carousel of two readable images beats one crowded one.

Let the layout come from the photos

Photos are not all the same shape, and a layout that ignores that has to crop the difference away. Three portraits and a landscape in four equal squares means the landscape loses its sides and the portraits lose their tops. The better approach — and the one this tool takes — is to derive each cell from the proportions of the photo going into it, so a tall photo gets a tall cell.

What that means in practice is that you should add your photos before choosing a layout, not after. The twelve arrangements offered will be different for four portraits than for four landscapes, because the good arrangements genuinely are different.

Fix the crops, not the layout

When one photo looks wrong, the instinct is to change the layout. Usually the problem is the crop: the subject is off-centre in its cell, or the automatic framing has kept the wrong part. Dragging inside a cell moves the photo within it, and the zoom sets how much is shown. Neither changes the arrangement.

If a face is being cut, that is worth reporting rather than working around — this tool treats a crop that clips a detected face as invalid and will not offer it, so a clipped face means the detection missed, and the fix is to set the focal point by hand.

Export once you know where it is going

For a screen, JPG at quality 90 and the exact pixel size of the destination. Bigger is not better: platforms downsample everything, and handing them a 4096-pixel file means their resizing settings apply instead of yours.

For print, 300 DPI at the physical size, exported as PDF if a print shop is involved. Check the per-photo resolution before exporting — a photo that is fine on screen can be soft when it is one of twelve on an A4 sheet, and finding that out on paper is expensive.