Make a heart photo collage

A heart made of photographs, not a heart-shaped frame around one.

The details

How it works

1. Add twenty or more photos.
2. Pick the heart shape and choose how tightly it is packed.
3. Download as a square, or print it at 12 × 12.

There are two different things called a heart collage, and they are worth separating. One is a single photograph masked into a heart, which is a frame effect and takes one photo. The other — the one most people mean, and the one this page makes — is a heart built out of many photographs, where the shape comes from which cells are filled rather than from a mask cut through the picture.

The second kind has a minimum. The outline of a heart is described by its edges, and an edge made of six photographs is not an edge, it is a suggestion. Twenty is about where the shape becomes unmistakable and thirty to forty is where it looks deliberate. Below twelve the result reads as a lumpy grid, which is why this page starts you at thirty rather than at the four or five other pages default to.

Because the shape comes from the arrangement rather than from masking, every photograph inside stays rectangular and uncropped at its edges. That matters: a heart mask cut across a face produces exactly the problem the rest of this site exists to avoid. The cells are square here, and the face-safety rule still applies to each of them, so a photograph whose subject cannot survive a square crop is placed where it has more room.

A square canvas suits it, because a heart is roughly as wide as it is tall. Printed, 12 × 12 inches at 300 DPI gives each of thirty photographs about an inch and a half, which is enough to recognise a face held at arm's length but not across a room — so for a wall piece, go larger or use fewer photographs.

Everything is computed in this browser tab. Nothing is uploaded, and the exported file carries no metadata.

Questions