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Free Photo Grid Maker

Arrange several photos into one photo grid instantly with our 100% free photo grid maker. Upload your pictures, set the columns and cell shape, and each photo crops to fill its cell for mood boards, contact sheets and print layouts, then export in seconds. No signup, no downloads needed. Trusted by 60,000+ artists worldwide.

Your photos

Nothing added yet. Drop your photographs on the sheet and they appear here, in the order they will be laid out.

Arrangement

Every cell the same size and shape.

Output size

The sheet grows with the grid.

Spacing

Finish

Export

Add two or more photographs and they are laid out here as you go.

Five arrangements, not one grid

Uniform lays every cell the same. Masonry is the one that does not crop at all: equal column widths, each photograph at its own proportions, the next picture to the shortest column. Featured gives the first a double square, mosaic gives every fifth one, and a filmstrip is a single row. The other four cover-crop — centred, scaled to fill, overflow trimmed — and you drag inside any cell to say which part of the picture that keeps.

20 controls, not a fixed result

Set columns, cell resolution, gap and outer margin, choose layout, cell shape and sheet, toggle transparent background and print the filename under each photo. 20 controls in all. Every change redraws over your own photograph, in this page's own document.

Part of the draw & transfer set

The picture you have open here is ready for grid drawing tool, image splitter and rectangular grid maker, and 10 more in the group — nothing to re-upload, because nothing was uploaded.

A named size, not whatever it came out as

Twelve output sizes in real pixels: a 2000 × 2000 feed post, a 1620 × 2880 story, A4 at 300 dpi, 8 × 10 in. The grid fills the one you pick, or the sheet grows from the cell resolution you set. Out comes a PNG, a JPG at a quality you choose, a one-page PDF, or a ZIP holding every cell on its own.

Drop in the photographs, choose how many columns and what shape the cells are, and take one composed image out. Each picture is scaled to fill its cell and centred, which is what makes a set of mixed-ratio photographs read as a grid rather than as a row of different-sized pictures.

The photo grid maker draws one of the 82 composition overlays in Grid Maker Pro, and the rest stack on the same image.

  • Cover-cropped, never letterboxed
  • 900px per cell
  • Reorderable
  • Nothing uploaded

What is a photo grid?

A photo grid maker composes several photographs into one image laid out on a grid, which is the inverse of what a splitter does. This one takes any number of pictures, fits them to a column count you choose, crops each to fill its cell so the layout stays even, and lets you set the gap, the outer margin, the corner rounding and the background before exporting one PNG at 900 pixels per cell. It is the inverse of an image splitter, which takes one picture apart.

Photo grid overlay on an even array of small monochrome prints pinned to a studio wall
Composing several pictures into one is the reverse of splitting: rather than protecting a single image from its cuts, you are making separate ones share a rhythm, and the space left between them does most of that work.
ProcessPhoto grid maker

How to make a photo grid

Several pictures into one composed sheet, with the cell count and the spacing under your control, exported at a resolution that will actually print.

  1. Add the photographs

    Select several at once, or add them in batches — new pictures append to the end of the grid. The order you add them in is the order they are laid out, left to right and then down, and it can be changed afterwards without starting again.

    JPG · PNG · GIF · WEBP

  2. Set the columns and the cell shape

    Columns decide the whole layout; rows follow from the number of photographs. The cell shape is the more consequential choice, because it sets what the finished object resembles: square for a feed, 4:5 for a portrait wall, 3:2 for a contact sheet of camera frames.

    Columns · Rows · Cell labels (A1, B2…)

  3. Space it, then export

    Gap, outer margin and corner rounding are what separate a composed grid from a collision of rectangles. Export gives one PNG at 900 pixels per cell, so a three-by-three comes out around 2,700 pixels across — enough to print.

    PNG · JPG · PDF · SVG · up to 600 DPI

Three steps, about a minute. No signup, no upload.

Capabilities

What the Photo Grid Maker does

Cover crop, not letterbox

A photo grid maker scales each photograph until it fills its cell, centres it, and trims the overflow. Fitting pictures inside their cells instead would leave bands of background at different sizes around each one — which is a list of pictures, not a grid.

The cell shape is the composition

A mixed set of landscape and portrait photographs only looks composed when every cell is the same shape. On a wall of holiday pictures, choosing the ratio once and cropping everything to it is what makes the set read as one object.

Gap and margin, separately

The space between the pictures and the space around the whole block do different jobs. An even gap with no outer margin bleeds to the edge; a margin larger than the gap frames the set. Both are controls because both are decisions.

Rounding that scales

Corner rounding is applied to the cell at export resolution, not to a preview and then enlarged. A rounded corner at 900 pixels per cell stays a clean curve in print rather than a stair-stepped edge.

Order without re-adding

Any photograph can be moved earlier or later, or dropped, at any point. Rearranging a grid by deleting everything and re-uploading in a new order is the single most common friction in browser collage tools.

Nothing is uploaded

Every photograph is decoded from a local object URL and drawn to a canvas in this page. Holiday pictures, family photographs and client work all stay on the machine they were opened on.

Plates

Photo grid examples: four grids, four intentions

A three-by-three of square cells with a small gap — the feed grid, and the most forgiving of mixed sources.
Four columns of 3:2 cells with almost no gap — a contact sheet, where the frames form one continuous surface.
Two columns of 4:5 cells with a wide outer margin — a print layout, framed like a mount.
A single column of 16:9 cells — a sequence read straight down, for process and story.
Comparison

Photo grid vs a phone collage app vs an online collage site

OptionWhere the work happensCells stay equalOrder can changeExport size
Grid Maker Prothis toolIn your browserYescover-cropped to one ratioYeswithout re-adding900px per cell
A phone collage appOn the deviceUsually, with fixed templatesSometimesScreen-sized
An online collage siteUploaded to a serverVaries by templateUsuallyOften watermarked
A design applicationOn your machineOnly if you crop themYesWhatever you set
The method

How a photo grid works — Why a grid of photographs is a cropping problem before it is a layout problem

A photo grid is arithmetic to lay out — divide the width, divide the height, place — and the arithmetic is the easy part. Of the 82 composition overlays and tools here, this is the one that composes finished pictures rather than guiding a drawing. The arithmetic is trivial. What decides whether the result looks composed is what happens to photographs that are the wrong shape for their cell, and there are only two honest answers.

Fit or fill, and why fill wins

A cell and a photograph of different aspect ratios leave two options. Software either fits the picture inside the cell — scaling until the whole image is visible, leaving background on two sides — or fill the cell, scaling until no background shows and trimming the overflow.

An open album page with rows of empty gummed mounting corners and no photographs
Arranging several pictures into one field depends on the spaces, not the pictures. Even out the intervals and photographs with nothing in common begin to look as though they belong together.

Fitting preserves every pixel of every photograph, which sounds respectful and looks wrong. A landscape frame and a portrait frame fitted into the same square cell end up as two small pictures surrounded by unequal amounts of background. The grid stops reading as a grid because the visual units are no longer the same size.

Filling loses part of each picture and produces an even field. This tool fills, centred, because a photo grid is a composition of one object rather than a display case for several. Where the crop matters more than the composition — a contact sheet where every frame must be visible — the answer is to choose a cell ratio that matches the photographs rather than to letterbox them.

Choose the cell ratio from the pictures, not the platform

Where every photograph came out of the same camera, the cell takes that camera's ratio: 3:2 for most interchangeable-lens cameras and 35mm film, 4:3 for phones and many compacts. Cropping is then close to zero and the grid is faithful.

A mixed set has no such ratio, and the decision becomes aesthetic. Square is the most forgiving because it crops landscape and portrait frames symmetrically. 4:5 suits portraits and prints well at common frame sizes. 16:9 reads cinematic and cuts the most from anything shot vertically.

The gap is doing more work than it looks

A zero gap makes a mosaic: the photographs form one continuous surface and the eye reads shapes across the boundaries. It is the right choice when the pictures are related in tone and you want the block to read as a texture.

A visible gap separates the frames and lets each one be looked at individually. The traditional value is small — a few percent of the cell — because a large gap starts to read as background with pictures scattered on it rather than as a grid.

The outer margin is a different decision from the gap, which is why it is a separate control. Margin equal to the gap makes the whole block feel edge-to-edge and modern. Margin noticeably larger than the gap frames the set like a mount, which is what you want if the sheet is going to be printed and hung.

The contact sheet is the ancestor of all of this

Before digital, a photographer printed a whole roll at frame size onto one sheet of paper, laid out in rows, to choose which negatives to enlarge. The contact sheet was a working document: uniform cells, tight gaps, sequence preserved, nothing cropped because the frames were all the same shape.

Almost every photo grid you see now is descended from it, and the two features that survived are the ones worth keeping — a consistent cell and a meaningful order. The social feed grid is a contact sheet with the sequence reversed and the cells squared.

Order is content

A grid is read left to right and then down, in the same order as text in most of the world. That makes position meaningful whether or not you intend it: the top-left cell is seen first and the bottom-right last, and a strong picture in the middle of a nine-grid anchors the whole thing.

For a wall of family photographs, chronology is usually the right order and is what people expect. For a portfolio grid, the strongest image should not be first — leading with it makes everything after it a decline. The conventional arrangement puts a strong picture early, the strongest at the end, and the quieter frames between them.

Resolution, and why the export is not the preview

The preview here is scaled to the column it sits in, which is around 600 pixels wide. Exporting that would produce a grid unusable for anything but a screen. The export is instead drawn fresh at 900 pixels per cell, so a three-by-three grid is around 2,700 pixels across before gaps and margins.

At 300 dpi — the usual print standard — 2,700 pixels is roughly nine inches. That prints comfortably at A4 and acceptably at A3. If the sheet is destined for a large print, fewer columns of larger cells will give a better result than many columns squeezed into the same output.

Where a photo grid is not the answer

A grid imposes equality on every picture in it. Every picture gets the same area and the same shape, and that is exactly wrong when one image is the subject and the others are supporting. A drawing grid does the opposite job — the rectangular grid page divides one picture so it can be copied, and the drawing-grid category cover that family. The image splitter does the opposite job, one picture into many tiles, and the Instagram grid maker the version of that sized for a feed. A layout with one large frame and several small ones says something a uniform grid cannot.

It is also the wrong tool when the pictures need to stay whole — documentation, product shots, anything where a crop changes the meaning. In those cases, match the cell to the source ratio so the crop is near-zero, or use a layout that lets the frames differ.

And it is the opposite of what an image splitter does. If the goal is to take one photograph apart into tiles — for a feed, a puzzle, or a poster printed across several sheets — that is a different operation on a different page.

Studio notes

Where a photo grid gets used

A studio wall of bare cork pinboard scattered with old pin holes above a low plan chest
An empty board is the real starting point. What goes on it is decided by the gaps between pictures at least as much as by the pictures themselves.
Prints and photo walls

Photo walls are the commonest use, and the one that benefits most from getting the cell ratio right — a mixed set of holiday pictures only looks deliberate once every frame is the same shape.

Portfolios and moodboards

Portfolio and moodboard grids, where the order carries as much meaning as the pictures. Being able to reorder without re-uploading is what makes the sequencing pass actually happen.

Sequences and process shots

Documentation and process shots — a build log, a recipe, a repair sequence — laid out in reading order so the steps follow each other without captions.

Questions

Photo grid: frequently asked questions

The geometry

What is a photo grid maker?

A photo grid maker composes several photographs into a single image laid out in rows and columns. It is the opposite of an image splitter: one takes many pictures and makes one sheet, the other takes one picture and makes many tiles.

Why are my photographs cropped?

Every picture is scaled to fill its cell and centred, with the overflow trimmed, so all the cells are the same size and shape. Fitting the pictures inside their cells instead would leave uneven bands of background around each one, which stops the layout reading as a grid.

Can I change the order after adding them?

Yes. Each photograph can be moved earlier or later, or removed, at any time, and the grid relays itself. Nothing has to be re-added to change the sequence.

Can I use it to make an Instagram feed grid?

This page composes several pictures into one sheet. Splitting a single picture across feed tiles is the other operation, and the Instagram grid splitter does that.

What gap should I use?

A small gap of a few percent of the cell separates the frames while keeping the block coherent. Zero gap makes a continuous mosaic. Large gaps start to read as background with pictures scattered on it.

Can I put a coloured background behind the grid?

Yes. The background colour fills the gaps, the outer margin and any area a rounded corner exposes, so it is what the whole sheet sits on.

Using it

How do I stop a photograph being cropped so much?

Choose a cell ratio closer to the shape of the photographs. A set from one camera crops almost not at all at 3:2; a phone set crops least at 4:3. Square crops landscape and portrait frames the most, but crops them symmetrically.

How many photographs can I add?

There is no fixed limit; the practical one is memory, since every picture is decoded at full size. Several dozen is comfortable on a laptop. Add them in batches if a very large set is slow.

How do I stop a photograph being cropped so heavily?

Change the column count or the cell proportion rather than the photograph. Every picture is cropped to fill its cell, so a portrait in a landscape cell loses its top and bottom — fewer columns gives taller cells, and matching the cell shape to the majority of your pictures fixes most of it at once.

Can I change the order after adding the photographs?

Yes, and it is worth doing deliberately rather than accepting the order they were added in. A grid of photographs reads left to right and top to bottom like a page, so the first cell and the last carry the most weight.

Export and print

How big is the exported image?

Each cell is drawn at 900 pixels, so a three-column grid exports around 2,700 pixels wide before gaps and margins. At 300 dpi that prints at roughly nine inches across, which covers A4 comfortably.

How large is the exported image?

It is sized from the paper format and DPI you choose rather than from the window, so a grid destined for print comes out at print resolution and one destined for a screen does not need to. Set both before exporting; changing them afterwards means exporting again.

Can I print the finished grid as a single sheet?

Yes, at any paper format from A5 to A2 and up to 600 DPI. A contact-sheet style print is the classic use — it is much easier to compare twenty photographs on one sheet of paper than one at a time on screen.

Choosing a grid

How is this different from a phone collage app?

Mostly in where the pictures go. A collage app uploads them; this composes entirely in the browser, so nothing leaves the device. The arrangements here are plainer too — five ways to lay the cells out, rather than decorative frames and stickers.

Practical matters

Is it free, and do I need an account?

It is free and there is no account. Nothing is watermarked, metered or held back.

Do my photographs get uploaded?

No. Each file is decoded from a local object URL and drawn to a canvas inside this page. There is no server, so there is nowhere for a photograph to be sent.

Does it work on a phone?

Yes. Adding several photographs at once from the camera roll works, and the export downloads as a PNG. Very large sets are more comfortable on a laptop because every image is decoded at full resolution.

Does it work with photographs of different shapes?

Yes, and the crop is how it copes: each picture fills its cell and loses whatever does not fit. Mixing portrait and landscape sources in one grid always costs something — either heavy cropping or an uneven layout — so decide which you would rather have before you start.

Open the tool Photo grid maker

Several pictures, one object

A photo grid takes three decisions: the columns, the cell shape, the order. Then export. Nothing uploaded, no signup, no watermark.

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