February
28th
2011How to Make a Photo Collage on the iPad

If you’ve been following my iPad blog, you’ve probably noticed that I like to include a lot of pictures, especially with my reviews. Because I am unable to use the WordPress web interface and instead blog from the BlogPress application, I don’t have access to the built-in gallery function that comes with WordPress. This makes it difficult to show multiple images in a small area of my blog.

My alternative to this problem was to simply create a collage to show multiple images at once. I don’t always want to create a long list of full-sized images: As you can see in my entry Best Chance, the first image of my entry contains four screenshots of the Best Chance app within a single JPG image file. I created this image on the iPad: no desktop PC Photoshop magic required!

The search for collage apps on the iPad brings up many results. The following are mini-reviews of the applications that I tried! (Can you tell I’m a crazy cat lady from my sample photos?!)

Photo Mess

Photo Mess does exactly what the title implies: it makes a messy collage. You pick your images individually and drag and drop them where you’d like. There are options for choosing borders or not, and if so, whatever colour, width, and opacity you would like. You can even choose to have a cork board background if you’d like that instead of a solid colour. There are also options for little decorations you can add if you purchase them as add-ons.

I enjoy this application but wish that the border edges weren’t so jagged. If there were an option for anti-aliasing and a better quality JPG export, I’d give it five stars! It’s very simple to use.

Photo Wall Lite

This application is very similar to Photo Mess except the quality of the created product is much better. Photo Wall gives you more control over your creation, but it is a little more complicated for beginners.

Each individual image can have their own separate border settings. As you can see in my sample image, I’ve done a thick black border, a thin black border, an orange border with a hard-edged drop shadow and an orange border with a soft-edged drop shadow. The controls are easy to use for choosing the options. It’d be nice to be able to set a default setting in case you are doing a lot of photos on one canvas that you want to have the same border.

The best part of this application is the quality of the export! The quality is lovely. Also, there are lots of options for changing the aspect ratio and dimensions. There are even dimension presets for extremely large monitors! Quite nice! The Lite version only allows you to save three images through the export tool. Under other conditions, you’d have to be satisfied with taking an iPad screenshot. The quality is still there, but it’s on the small side, plus you will need to crop it.

In my opinion, this application is a lot stronger than Photo Mess but not as easy to use. Photo Mess would be better for those in a rush.

Picture Collage HD

This application is not all that powerful. Actually, I don’t really like it at all (no offense to the creator – I feel so mean!) The rotating and resizing of images in the collage is easy, but the quality of pictures produced? Not so good!

First, you need to add the images you want to use. This is a strange interface. First, I added my images to the list, then clicked collage. However, this doesn’t actually add them to the collage. You first need to click the empty bar to make a check mark appear. Only then the image will appear. (Why isn’t it checked by default, then unchecked if you decided against it?)

The images are turned into thumbnails. That’s fine, but when you go into the collage, the pictures are still thumbnails! When you resize them, you can tell right away that the images are upscaling the thumbnails rather than using the high-res version. The photos I used are taken on a Canon DSLR camera. There’s no way they should look that bad of quality. The images are not cropped to be square either: they’re resized unproportionally! How many of you start out with square photographs to collage with? Not many, I’m willing to bet!

I also find that green background strange. Why is it there? After you export your finished image, the background isn’t there. It looks much nicer with the plain white background anyways.

The concept is nice, but it’s just plain messy. I would not recommend downloading this application.

Photo Frame and Collage (PhotoCollage)

PhotoCollage is available on the iPhone only. I really wanted to see what the iPhone had to offer as well, but this application just didn’t work for me. The interface looks nice, and there are lots of easy to navigation options:

When I tap “Choose Photos,” however, it just loads forever and ever and ever… I wondered if it was because I was using an iPad, but I installed it on my iPhone, and the same thing happened. I didn’t allow the application to see my current location which allows it to see information about where the pictures are taken, but I wouldn’t think that this would cause all my photos to not work.

Sadly, I’ll never get to know what this application is like, so I can’t suggest it one way or another.

Tile Wallpaper

Tile Wallpaper is technically not a collage application, but this is the application that I used to create the four images side by side on my Best Chance review. This application is really supposed to be used to make bizarre tiling wallpapers like this one:

Trippy, huh?

You are given the option of using one to four images. By default, the images are only repeated a few times:

If all I want to do is show two images side by side, all I would do is open this repeated image up in a photo editing application like PhotoPad and crop it down.

In my Best Chance review, I used four images. Using three images has problems if you are going to crop, because there’s no good way to lay it out how you’d want it. You’ll end up with a duplicate somewhere like this:

This is really not using the application how it is meant, but you can easily put several images into one image file by doing this.

IMGPalette

Like the first collage app I reviewed, IMGPalette suffers from non-anti-aliased edges, causing a very jaggedy look. You can choose whether or not to have a border, but there are no border options.

What is really interesting about IMGPalette is that you don’t necessarily have to use your own images. It comes with a built-in Google and Flickr image search. I decided to type in “kitten.” After a few seconds, several pictures appeared on my screen. It’s very random, but nifty! You can “throw” the images off the edge of the screen to delete them.

The free version has a watermark on the image, which is a bit unfortunate. Really, having the image search in there isn’t enough of a benefit for me to use this application over Photo Wall. I could easily just browse Google Image Search for a Flickr Photostream and save them to my Saved Photos folder – and then have a choice over what is put on my screen.

In Conclusion

Hopefully you’re not all having a TL;DR reaction to this long post. I’m still looking for an application which will allow you to create a more stylish image, triptych style. (I kind of want to develop my own app!) I dream of having the ability to simply place a few images side-by-side, perhaps with a border in between the images. Overall, my favourite photo collage app is Photo Wall, mostly for its overwhelming advantage in image quality!