But more important is choosing the photos you want to share, before you lay them out,” he says.Īs you tap to select the photos you want to use, Layout then presents previews of custom layouts you can scroll through at the top of its screen. “Most apps give you a bunch of empty grids. “The first thing you see is a view of the Camera Roll,” explains Joshua Dickens, Product Designer at Instagram. In Layout, Instagram offers a new take on how collages are built by changing the order of the steps involved in the process. To Instagram’s credit, it didn’t just knock off the existing collage-making apps already on the market, but instead tried to come up with an app that would improve the experience for mobile users. The apps are all similar in nature – they offer a variety of blank photo grids which users can customize with their own photos, and sometimes optional text or stickers. Today, the app stores are filled with utilities that offer this sort of capability – including apps like Pic Stitch, Pic Collage, InstaCollage, PhotoGrid, and many others. One in five monthly active users on Instagram use a collage app at least once, we’re told. With Layout, Instagram users will be able to quickly build collages using their mobile photos, which they can then choose to share to Instagram, Facebook, or elsewhere.Ĭollage-making is already a popular activity on Instagram, the company tells us. Instagram today announced the debut of a new application called Layout, the company’s next standalone creation tool outside of its flagship photo-sharing application.

Instagram photo grid app