Create a digital photo collage

Assemble favourite photos in an artistic compilation

By Laura Pratt with Microsoft Word instructions by Heather Camlot

Mary Spytz has crafted a dozen rich photo collages over the years as gifts of celebration for her family. “To me, they’re like quilts,” says the artist from Hinton, Alta. “They really are family heirlooms.”

Photo collages offer creative photo enthusiasts an entirely different direction for their artistic pursuits. “With them, you get to see everything at one time,” says Spytz. “You can take in a whole event in one glance.”

IN THIS STORY

Arrange photos into a collage | Get layering | Enhance your creation | Play with photo mosaic software | Share your collage

Arrange photos into a collage

As you might assume from the name, digital photo collages are much the same craft you did as a kid with a glue stick and torn-up magazine pages. But you aren’t gluing images onto construction paper here; you’re digitally “gluing” them on your computer to create a printable collage of favourite photos.

Photo-collage possibilities are extensive. They range from an arrangement of horizontal and vertical images to a complex, eye-catching mosaic of photographic “tiles” arranged to produce an original photo.

Collages are ideal for scrapbooks, holiday cards and wall art.

Get layering

With Word, you can easily create eye-catching photo collages using your images stored in Windows Live Photo Gallery. To get started, perfect your images by fixing red-eye or adjusting brightness or colour in Photo Gallery. Then open our 20-picture collage template in Word. There are two methods you can use to fill in the blocks.

Method 1: Quick and easy

Select a box. Then go to Format > Shape Fill > Picture > and select the image you wish to use. (Word will scale the image to fit.)
To delete the last image placed in the box, hit CTRL-Z. If you hit delete, you’ll delete the image and the box.
Continue until all boxes are filled.

Method 2: Room to play

Download our photo collage template to get started.

Go to Insert > Picture and select your first photo.
With the photo still selected, click Format > Text Wrapping > In Front of Text. You can drag the image around the screen and place it over any box you wish.
Scale the image by dragging one of the corners or sides.
If you prefer to crop the image, make sure the image is selected. Then click Format > Crop > drag the corners or sides as desired.
To change the size of a box, select it and then drag one of the corners or sides.
Continue until all the boxes are filled.

Enhance your creation

Get even more creative with the editing tools in Word. For example, to produce a collage of all your vacation snaps in the shape of a giant sailboat, follow these steps.

Insert a Clip Art image of a boat into a new Word document. (Insert > Clip Art, enter the search term sailboat, and select the image you want.)
Choose personal photos with lots of blues and whites. (Insert > Pictures.)
Scatter photos like polka dots on your sail. (Make sure to highlight the photo. Then select Text Wrapping > In Front of Text to move the image around the page and over the sailboat.) Or reconstruct the boat out of photos by recreating the sail out of shapes (Insert > Shape); then place a photo into each of those shapes. (Highlight the shape > Drawing Tools > Format > Shape Fill > Picture.)

Play with photo mosaic software

Some photo-collage software allows you to create photo mosaics. Photo mosaics (photo montages, photo-tiled pictures or photo tapestries) are big pictures made up of many smaller pictures. The thumbnail tile images can be seen up close but reveal an entirely different picture from a distance. Try ArcSoft PhotoMontage VE (fee) and AndreaMosaic (free).