Make a photo collage

Sizes to start from

The start page offers the sizes people use most: Instagram post (1080 × 1080), Instagram portrait (1080 × 1350), Story / Reel / TikTok (1080 × 1920), YouTube thumbnail (1280 × 720), Full HD (1920 × 1080) and A4. File › New… adds more:

• Social: Facebook cover, X (Twitter) header, LinkedIn banner.
• Screen: 4K, a 2560 × 1440 desktop wallpaper and a phone wallpaper.
• Print, at 300 pixels per inch: A4, US Letter, 4 × 6 and 5 × 7 inch photos, an 18 × 24 inch poster and a business card.

Or type any width and height. The background can be white, black, transparent or any color; you can change it later with a fill layer.

A neat layout by hand

Octoolo has no ready-made collage layouts: you place each photo yourself, which means any arrangement works, from a tidy grid to a loose scrapbook. A few helpers keep it neat:

• Smart guides. While you drag, a photo's edges and middle snap to the canvas's edges and center and to the other photos. Hold Ctrl to drag freely.
• Exact numbers. The Properties panel's Place and size section takes a position, a size and an angle. On a 1080-pixel square, a two-by-two grid with 20-pixel gaps has cells of 510 pixels at 20 and 550.
• Nudging. The arrow keys move the picked photo by one pixel, ten with Shift.
• Rulers and guides. Ctrl R shows rulers; drag from them to set guides that photos snap to.

Fitting a photo into a frame

Photos rarely have the shape of their spot in a grid. Instead of cropping each one beforehand, frame it on the canvas:

• Draw the frame with the Shapes tool (U): a rectangle, with a Radius for round corners, or an ellipse.
• Put the photo's layer directly above the shape in the Layers panel, and choose Layer › Create clipping mask (Ctrl Alt G).
• The photo now shows only inside the shape. Move and size it to choose what the frame shows.

Leave gaps between the frames and put a color fill layer at the back: the gaps become borders in that color. Effects on the frames add a Shadow for a printed-photos look or an Outline for a white edge.

Quality, and coming back to it

A placed photo larger than the canvas is shown smaller to fit, but its layer keeps all its pixels, so you can size it up again without blur, up to its own size. When you export, the collage is drawn from those full-size photos.

File › Save keeps the collage as an Octoolo project, every photo still a layer, to change later. For printing, export at full size: a 300 ppi canvas such as A4 or 4 × 6 has exactly the pixels the print needs. To make a PDF of several collages, export them as JPG and see JPG to PDF.

Cut-outs make lively collages: remove the background from a photo of a person and let them stand in front of the others.