Have a lot of photos on your iPhone, but don’t quite know what to do with them? How about laying them out in an easy to use collage maker that let’s you pop your photos into easy to edit templates that resemble scrapbooking pages and then uploading them to your favorite social network? Sound good?
Overview
Picture Collage Maker for the iPhone by Pearl Mountain allows you to take photos, either from your photo album on your iPhone, or taken directly from your device’s built-in camera, and insert them into a page with customizable layouts that you can decorate as you wish, and then print them out, or save them to your camera roll or upload to various social networks.
The app is basically a one-trick pony, but it performs its single trick very well. It’s designed to do one thing, allow you to layout your photos into frames and collages in a WYSIWYG editor, much like the popular scrapbooking hobby allows you to do with physical photos. The great thing about the app is that you can lay your pages out in the app, and then print them in color on good quality paper and then include them in physical scrapbooking projects.
The app includes numerous templates, backgrounds, and stickers to decorate your photos. While the app includes a decent amount of objects and templates you can use, there are also others add-on objects and templates that can be obtained via in-app purchases.
After starting up Photo Collage Maker, you begin by selecting a template for your photos collage, then you simply tap the photo areas in the page to add photos either via your iPhone’s built-in camera, or from your photo library.
The app also includes a very nice selection of photo editing tools that include the ability to enhance the photo, add effects, crop, adjust the brightness, contrast, saturation, and sharpness of the photo, also remove redeye, whiten, even add meme lines.
You can then add, edit and rotate text and any decorations or other objects that are on the screen. Most elements can be resized and arranged in almost any way you’d like.
Once the page is to your liking, you can select the size of your page, and then save it to your photo album, email it to your friends and family, or share with them via multiple social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, and Instagram. You can even include a message with your posted collage.
You can also open your creation in other apps you may have installed on your iPhone, this seemed to be a bit hit or miss, as the collage opened fine in iPhoto, but not in PhotoStudio, even though it was listed by the app.
While the app doesn’t allow you to print your creation directly from the app, you can save it to your photo album and then print it on a handy airPrint compatible printer. I didn’t have a color printer operational, but I did test the function with a laser printer I had online, and it printed quickly and filled most of the page. I’m sure it would be quite dazzling in full color.
Verdict
Picture Collage Maker is a great little tool for making photo collages with the photos from your iPhone. The app interface is well laid out, and is easy to learn as you go, important for an app like this. I was a little disappointed that you couldn’t print directly from the app, yet it is easy enough to save it to your photo album and then print it from there.
I’m not a big fan of in-app purchases, however the items are priced reasonably enough.
If you are a scrapbooking fan, and want to be able to quickly and easily lay out scrapbooking pages, you might want to take a look at Picture Collage Maker. Even if you just like to play with photo editing apps, this is one to look at. It has a good set of editing tools, and it’s fun to play with the layout of the pages.
Rating:4/5[rating:4]
Price: Currently FREE for a limited time for the iPhone in the App Store, with in-app Purchases available. [DIRECT LINK]
Pros:
- Easy to learn and easy to use.
- Good selection of photo editing and layout tools.
- The ability to post directly to social networks is plus.
Cons:
- I hope to see the developer add in-app printing ability.
- Why no iPad version? Seems like a natural for an app like this.
*Note: The above review was commissioned by the developer in accordance with our app review policy, and has been written in an objective, unbiased fashion.
