Instagram just launched a new app to let you create photo collages
Instagram just launched a new standalone app called Layout that lets users easily create photo collages by combining multiple photos from their phone into a single image.
Users can simply drag and drop images into one of Layout's eight photo formats (all of which can be tweaked by dragging the borders of each frame), and every collaged photo can also be mirrored or flipped.
Compilations created in Layout don't automatically get uploaded to Instagram, giving users more room to mess around without having to worry about making their creations public (you also can't add filters in Layout). There's a "Photo booth" feature that lets users take a series of quick pics that will automatically be put into one of the app's photo formats, and "Faces," which will only show camera roll images with people in them.
This is the second standalone app Instagram has launched since releasing Hyperlapse, which lets users create time-lapse videos, last fall. Layout is a direct competitor to other popular apps like Pic Stitch or Image Sizer. One notable difference between Pic Stitch and Layout, however, is that you can't add colored borders between photos in Instgram's new app.
For now, Layout is only available for iOS, with an Android version on the way soon (no mention of Windows yet).
Instagram chose to keep Layout as a separate app - instead of integrating collage features into the main app - because it wanted to avoid clutter.
"Instagram is really simple and that's what people love about it," product designer for Layout, Joshua Dickens, told Re/code. "Building [Layout] into the main app would inherently make it more complicated."