A collage is a small layout problem. The photos matter less than the rules you apply to them consistently.

Choose a Grid Before You Choose Photos

  • 2 × 2 / 3 × 3 equal grid — calm, neutral, works for product sets and before/after series. Crop every photo to the same aspect ratio.
  • Hero + supporting — one large image plus 2–4 smaller ones. Best when one photo is clearly the strongest; creates a hierarchy instead of a flat wall.
  • Strip (1 × 3 horizontal or vertical) — ideal for sequences and step-by-step content; reads in a defined order.
  • Diptych (side by side) — the most reliable format for before/after comparisons, because there's nothing else to look at.

Pick the grid first, then select photos that fit it. Doing it the other way round is how collages end up with awkward gaps.

Three Consistency Rules

  1. Uniform gutters. Use the same gap between every pair of images — commonly 1–3% of the collage width. Uneven gaps are the single most common reason a collage looks amateur. Either use gaps everywhere or nowhere; a mix looks accidental.
  2. Uniform crops. Mixing portrait and landscape inside a grid creates ragged edges. Crop everything to one ratio, or design the layout around the mixed shapes deliberately.
  3. Uniform tone. Photos shot at different times of day or with different white balance clash badly when adjacent. Nudge them toward a common brightness and color temperature — or convert the whole set to black and white, which hides tonal mismatch entirely and often looks more intentional.

How Many Photos?

Three to six for a social post; up to nine for a grid-style highlight. Beyond that each image renders too small to read on a phone, and the collage becomes a texture rather than a set of pictures. If you have twenty good photos, make three collages, not one.

Export Settings

  • Dimensions: aim for at least 1080 px on the short edge for social; for print, calculate from the print size (inches × 300).
  • Remember that each source photo only occupies a fraction of the final canvas: in a 3 × 3 grid on a 2000 px canvas, each cell is about 660 px, so sources under ~700 px will look soft. Start from originals, not from downloaded copies.
  • Format: JPEG at quality 85 for photo collages; PNG only if the collage includes text or flat graphics.
  • Do the resize and compression after assembling, so the whole canvas is processed once rather than each tile being compressed twice.