5 best free photo layout apps

Photo layout apps, which can help you quickly and easily create attractive photo collages and montages, are an absolute godsend for those of us who aren't conveniently blessed with mad Photoshop skills. After testing dozens of them, we can now bring you, in alphabetical order, the five best free photo layout apps out there.

Choose one of these to take your design skills to the next level without having to even thinkabout layer masksor lossy compression.

1. Canva

Canva is arguably so much more than a photo layout app: It's a complete graphic design suite. But if you just need photo layout, it's highly recommended for exactly that. Canva offers a fabulous photo collage tool with hundreds of different grid-style layouts for you to choose from for free.

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As well as giving you the option to easily create freestyle photo collages and montages, Canva offers designs sized specially for all the major social media services. If you're looking to create a photo-based Instagram or Facebook Story, this app helps you do it quickly and easily.

Credit: screengrab: canva Credit: screengrab: canva

You can use your own content, or you can add to your design with hundreds of thousands of free photos and graphics from Canva. The app also gives you the ability to collaborate with other Canva users and work together to create a montage. Canva allows you to save your designs to the cloud; even the free version gives you 5GB of cloud storage.

Canva Pro costs from $12.99 a month and gives you unlimited access to over 420,000 templates; more than 75 million premium stock photos, videos, audio, and graphics; 100GB of cloud storage; and the ability to create a "Brand Kit" with your own fonts, brand color palette, and logos to use on the Canva platform.

2. Layout from Instagram

We're big fans of the free Layout app from Instagram. It's not as full-featured as other photo layout apps, but it's very intuitive and simple to use, and it will provide you with watermark-free photo collages in a matter of seconds.

Get started by selecting the images you want to use from your phone's photos, then the app dynamically creates different layout options with photos arranged in different ways, all horizontal, all vertical, and a mix of the two, etc. Simply tap to choose the design that best suits your needs.

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Credit: screengrAb: layout from instagram Credit: screengrab: layout from instagram

Once you've selected your layout, you can drag and drop the images to reorder them, flip them, and add a border. It's a quick process to share your creation: Instagram and Facebook obviously come up as the primary shortcut share options.

3. Moldiv

Moldiv is a photo editing app that's available for iOSand Android. Its beauty camera functionality, which softens your skin, slims your face, and enlarges your eyes, makes it a popular choice for selfies.

Moldiv also offers comprehensive layout options, including magazine-style layouts that allow you select a design you fancy, replace the images with your own photos, and switch out the text to whatever you want your message to be.

Credit: screengrab: moldiv Credit: screengrab: moldiv

As far as straightforward collages go, Moldiv offers more than 300 different designs, all of which are grid-based, with different-sized squares and rectangles, to choose from. Whether you want to simply stitch two photos together or create an elaborate grid of imagery, the options are there for you.

4. PicCollage

PicCollageis a fresh and fun photo layout app that offers cool and contemporary designs, many of which are available for free — although if you want to get the best out of this app, you're going to need to pay for the premium functionality, which costs $35.99 a year.

PicCollage'stemplates are organized into categories, such as summer, "thank you," travel, birthday, and the like, which makes it easy to find the correct design to suit your needs.

Credit: screengrab: piccollage Credit: screengrab: piccollage

This app also really shines when it comes to cute stickers. There are an absolute ton of really sweet little stickers, with sayings and phrases, food and drink items, and graphics such as hearts, stars, and flowers that you can overlay on your design. These are also organized into categories, making it simple to find the best graphics to add the perfect finishing touch to your creation.

5. Pic Stitch

Pic Stitchoffers an ad-supported free version of its app that allows you to create and export very basic photo collages and montages. If you pay for the annual $29.99 subscription, you get access to more advanced tools, with 300+ collage layouts, 20+ filter packs, 10+ border packs, video editing tools, and the option to add music to your creations.

Credit: screengrab: pic stitch Credit: screengrab: pic stitch

Pic Stitch's free layouts are sorted into "classic," offering a mix of standard square and rectangular designs, and "fancy," offering more contemporary options for you to browse. You can also view trending layouts, although those are often mostly only available to subscribers.

But the free version of the app is quick and easy to use. Simply select the layout you want, add your imagery, and then hit the export button. This gives you the ability to save your creation to your phone or share it to the major social networks.