About the board

ImageCollageMaker is one tool: a rectangle of a size you choose, and whatever you decide to put on it. There is nothing to sign up for, nothing to install, and no account behind any of it.

Why an empty rectangle

Most collage sites hand you an arrangement and ask you to drop photographs into it. That is a genuinely good product for four holiday pictures and a square to post. It is the wrong product for a folder of a hundred and sixty, because the interesting decisions — what is large, what overlaps what, where the eye lands first — are exactly the ones an arrangement has already made for you.

So this board starts empty and stays empty until you fill it. When you want structure, the layouts it offers are generated for the photographs you actually have — two side by side, twelve in a grid, a hundred packed whole onto a poster — and each one says how much of every photograph it keeps before you take it. Any of them is one step away from being undone or released into loose frames.

What it deliberately is not

• Not a page-layout program. No headlines, no drawn shapes, no trim marks yet — the only text is contact-sheet numbering. A poster that needs a headline gets one wherever it is being printed, for now.
• Not a photo editor. Crop inside a frame, change opacity, turn it. There is no exposure slider and there will not be one.
• Not a phone tool for a two-hundred-photo poster. A small collage — up to a dozen photographs at an Instagram, story, square or A4 size — is made start to finish on a phone: choose a layout, swap by dragging, reframe inside a cell, export. A board of two hundred frames and a rotation arm still wants a pointer and a large screen, and the page says so when you are on one.
• Not a place to store anything. The arrangement is written to your browser so you can come back to it. The photographs are not written anywhere at all.

Who makes it, and how it is paid for

ImageCollageMaker is made and run by one small team, as its own site. It costs nothing to use, puts no watermark on anything at any size, and carries no advertising. The one problem it was built around is holding a couple of hundred photographs in one browser tab without running out of memory — and telling you, before you print or post, exactly what your collage will be.

Questions, corrections and requests go through the contact page.

Typefaces for your words

Text frames, headings and captions are set in typefaces served from this site, all under the SIL Open Font License 1.1: Hanken Grotesk, EB Garamond, Great Vibes, Oswald and Noto Sans Devanagari. The licence texts for the caption faces are at /fonts/ beside the font files.