Large Photo Collage Software
November 21, 2015 1:16 AM   Subscribe

Is there a non-photo shop option that will let me create a collage where I can resize photos and some other basic tweaks?

Every Christmas, I usually buy a big picture frame and fill it up with 25-30 photos of our family over the last year. I thought this year I'd like to get a big canvas with a collage instead (same effect, weighs a billion kilos less, could well look nicer than many frames I've bought, I like canvases in general).

My problem is, all the collage options I've found suck. 90% of them are limited in the number of photos - I need 25-30 - and the ones that do offer lots, e.g. Picasa, just generate template forms with no adjustment.

I honestly didn't think it would be so hard, it's essentially the same function 90% of photobook softwares have had for like a decade.

Do you know of a program I can do this in? The photos are already processed, they just need to be slotted into a collage pattern with white borders, allowing resize. No PhotoShop, please. I don't have it, and don't want it. I'm not averse to paying - I tried Gimp, but trying to load so many 2-6MB pictures in as layers is time consuming and super annoying. I get that it can be done, but I don't want to spend three hours doing it. Any ideas would be gratefully received.
posted by smoke to Technology (11 answers total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
 
Mac or Pc?
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 2:04 AM on November 21, 2015


Response by poster: PC, but Mac would not be a problem if that's what it takes.
posted by smoke at 2:16 AM on November 21, 2015


Have you considered using page layout software? It would give you a lot of flexibility, which can be good and bad.

Scribus is free and available on mac or pc.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 2:31 AM on November 21, 2015 [1 favorite]




PhotoScape might work for you.
posted by kariebookish at 2:51 AM on November 21, 2015


If you're basically just talking about arranging and resizing a bunch of rectangles with white borders I'd agree with Brandon and say you should try Scribus.
posted by XMLicious at 3:07 AM on November 21, 2015


Getpaint.net

Easier than gimp, freer than photoshop.
posted by tilde at 4:33 AM on November 21, 2015


One thing I'd be careful about is that if you use something designed for working with raster graphics it may degrade the quality of the images every time you tweak one of them by resizing or rotating it. I don't remember paint.net having features to preserve the originals of embedded images and re-sample them later upon changes but it's been a while since I used it.

Bah, I just realized that I was confusing Scribus and Inkscape in my comment up above. I think something like this which is a single page would be easier to do with Inkscape. (Scribus could to it too, it's just that Scribus also has lots of functionality essentially related to typesetting books that might get in the way.)
posted by XMLicious at 6:44 AM on November 21, 2015


I think Posterino would be a perfect solution for you. It's quick and easy, yet gives very polished results. I actually do have Photoshop and don't even bother using it for this type of project because Posterino is so easy to use, why bother? Mac only though. Reviews here.
posted by LuckySeven~ at 10:56 AM on November 21, 2015 [1 favorite]


Big Huge Labs offers a number of solutions.
posted by seawallrunner at 4:41 AM on November 22, 2015


Response by poster: So after some investigation (Sweet georgia brown but there are a *Tonne* of crappy collage programs), I settled on CollegeIt (Pro). It can handle a seemingly unlimited number of pictures, lets you set size and dpi of the whole image, resizes pictures automatically to fit, and lets you crop them and re-centre framing. It doesn't, alas, let you resize the individual photo squares, but has a random feature that nearly sort of does the job. Scribus was too much stuffing around, it doesn't even resize the images for a given square, and no way was I doing that for 30 separate photos.

So CollageIt it is, for now.
posted by smoke at 12:24 AM on November 24, 2015 [1 favorite]


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