Start 2015 With a Collage

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If you are anything like me, you have thousands of pictures living on your phone without a hope of manifesting into a physical print.

If your reasons for this are the same as mine, they are simple; the quantity of pictures I take is not equal to the quality. It takes time to sift through the ones that I really like, and there are only so many pictures of my cat that are worth printing. There are many solutions to this problem (as evidenced by our previous blog post from November 13th), but today, I'll showcase one of them.

My favourite way to display phone pictures in particular is to put them into a collage. The main reason that collages lend themselves well to a picture taken on a phone is that the resolution on phones doesn't tend to be the best. You can make a large print with several low resolution images without worrying about whether you will have a blurry mess at the end. A collage is a good way to tell a story with your pictures, as well. You can create a dynamic gallery in one print, which also saves your wall space.

This time of year, the most common story to tell is that of the last 12 months of pictures, and memories that you've made. In my case, Instagram made the perfect way to filter through my pictures, because I was only posting pictures that I wanted to showcase, anyway.

Other options might be sorting through pictures of a trip, or choosing some family pictures from the holidays. Other great collages can be made from wedding pictures as well.

On our website, there are many pre-made collages to choose from, but if you are feeling creative, or if you like to scrapbook (or if you have more or less pictures than the pre-made collages), you can make your own freestyle collage with the tool provided.

You can choose to print from a 4x6 up to a 20x30, and there are mounting options for each if you decide that you'd like to make the print thicker and more durable as either a substitute or an additive to a frame.

The first thing you'll do after you decide on a size is to choose how many pictures you'll want to add.

One useful tip to start is to decide whether you want a colour or a picture in the background. If you choose a picture, you can decide to make it a focus, or choose a picture without too much detail so as not to be distracting. Next, drag in your pictures from the side, and place them where you want them. Depending on the size of print you choose, make sure you resize your images by dragging the corner of the box around the picture as they'll be quite small to start out with. Mix it up by making them different sizes and add text if you'd like.

We think that printing your photos is important, and gives you a physical backup if your phone or computer fails. It also allows you to get creative in decorating your home, and collages are an easy and good looking way to do that!