MontageMergedThe weekend is here, a chance for people to spend time out with their friends and families taking photos on their smartphones. Sharing those images to Instagram comes naturally these days, but there’s one catch: posting a whole lot of images all at once is a good way to annoy everyone who follows you on Facebook’s photo-sharing network.

geekwireapp2Enter Layout, a new app for the iPhone made by Instagram that solves the problem of sharing too many photos by letting users easily create a square-shaped collage of images. Layout is far from the first or only collage-making app on the market. People who already have another preferred photo stitching app may want to just stick with what they know, but for the rest of us, Layout is a well-designed free option for bringing a bunch of photos together.

IMG_0686Starting a collage is simple: users tap on small thumbnails of pictures from their phone’s image library, and the app starts stitching them together in a variety of layouts at the top third of the screen. Once users have picked out the photos they want, they can scroll through the layouts and pick one that they think most matches the style they want to use.

Once they’ve picked out a collage template to use, everything else is customizable, from the slice of the image used in the collage to the size of each pane and its location. Moving things around and customizing templates is super-straightforward, smooth and fast: it’s easy to take a starting layout and with a few drags turn it into something a bit more custom-tailored to the images.

After that, sharing the resulting collage is fairly straightforward: users tap the save button, and it’s saved to their phone’s image library. After that they can (unsurprisingly) easily share it to Facebook and Instagram, or open up their device’s share sheet to send it to other applications.

One of the app’s stand-out features is its “Faces” tab that searches a user’s camera roll for all the photos that have a face in them. It’s an easy way to put together a collage of all the people at an event, or just show off some top-notch selfie skills. There’s also a “recents” tab for photos that users recently considered adding to collages. I didn’t find it particularly useful (since I’m not creating multiple collages out of the same material) but it would be convenient for people digging deep into their library for material.

The app also includes a “photo booth” feature that lets people capture up to four photos and put them into a collage with just a couple taps. It’s a fun little party trick, similar to the photo booths strewn across malls and shopping centers. The one problem with it as it’s implemented right now is that there’s no way to manually set the delay in between each shot, so people only have a single second to strike a new pose before the next photo gets taken.

Overall, Layout is an app that I’ll be happy to use whenever I want to put a few images together, with one caveat. Square photos are Instagram’s only method of sharing, so it makes sense for the app to feature them heavily, but it feels incomplete without support for other image sizes. Hyperlapse, the company’s other standalone app, records full-frame video, so I’m hopeful that Layout will pick up support for other sizes soon.

Layout is available for free from the iOS App Store. According to the company, a version for Android should be available “in the coming months.”

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