A collage is really two decisions — how the space is divided, and where each photo sits inside its share of it. This guide walks through both in NextCollage, a collage maker that runs entirely in your browser, so no photo is ever uploaded and nothing needs installing.
The ratio decides how much room each photo actually gets, so it is worth settling first rather than cropping twice. These are the ones that come up most often:
| Where it goes | Ratio | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Instagram post | 1:1 | The classic square grid collage; every cell reads at thumbnail size. |
| Instagram portrait | 4:5 | Takes the most vertical space allowed in the feed. |
| Story or Reel cover | 9:16 | Full-screen on a phone; keep to two or three cells so faces stay large. |
| Desktop wallpaper or slide | 16:9 | Wide layouts with one hero cell and a strip of supporting photos. |
| A4 / 3:2 | Export at a high multiplier so the result holds up at 300 DPI. |
Templates are a starting point, not a limit. In the Layout panel you set columns and rows anywhere from 1 to 12, and then reshape the result:
Select a rectangular block of cells — click one, then shift-click the opposite corner — and merge them with ⌘M. This is how you get a hero photo: a 3×3 grid with the top-left 2×2 merged gives one large photo and five small ones, which is the most reliable collage shape there is, because it tells the eye where to look first.
Any cell can be split horizontally (⌘D) or vertically (⇧⌘D), including a cell you merged earlier. Splitting is how you add a narrow band for a caption photo without disturbing the rest of the grid.
A layout you like can be saved to your own template library and reused on the next collage, so a series of posts can share one visual system.
Most collages fail at this step: photos are dropped in and left wherever the automatic crop put them. Three habits fix that.
Fill makes a photo cover its cell and crops the overflow; fit shows the whole photo and leaves the background visible around it. Fill is the right default for a dense grid; fit is useful for product shots and screenshots where nothing may be cut.
Gap and padding do more for a collage than any filter. A gap of a few pixels reads as a contact sheet; a larger gap with a white background reads as a printed photo album. Keep the outer padding equal to or slightly larger than the gap, and the layout will look intentional.
Backgrounds can be a solid colour, a gradient, one of your own photos, or transparent — export a transparent PNG when the collage will be placed on top of something else. Borders and drop shadows are per-collage rather than per-cell, so the result stays consistent.
For colour, apply one look to every photo rather than a different filter per cell. Photos taken on different phones, at different times of day, pull together when they share the same brightness, contrast, saturation and warmth. Applying a look to all photos at once is a single action in the Photo panel.
Export size is set as a multiplier of the design size, or as an exact long-edge pixel size. As a rule of thumb:
NextCollage renders the export from the same layout maths as the on-screen preview rather than screenshotting the page, so what you arranged is exactly what comes out — at any size.
| Action | Shortcut |
|---|---|
| Undo / redo | ⌘Z / ⇧⌘Z |
| Select all cells | ⌘A |
| Merge selection | ⌘M |
| Split horizontally / vertically | ⌘D / ⇧⌘D |
| Rotate photo · reset framing | R · 0 |
| Export | ⌘E |
A puzzle grid is the opposite move from a collage: instead of many photos in one frame, it is one photo cut into many posts that line back up on your profile. The grid splitter handles that.
Square tiles are the safe choice: a profile page renders every post as a square whatever you upload. Choosing 4:5 gives each individual post more height in the feed, and the profile grid still lines up, because it crops each one back to its middle square.
App Store listings and Instagram carousels both read better when one element runs from one slide into the next — a phone that carries on across the seam, or a headline that spans two frames. The seamless carousel maker does that by turning the problem around: you lay out one wide strip, and it cuts the slides for you.
Both tools live in the same studio as the collage maker, and each keeps its own document — so switching between them never disturbs what you were doing in the others.