You have a few good photos and a couple of short clips from the same beach day, and you want them in one post. Not a slideshow, and not four separate posts. One frame, with the videos playing next to the photos.
That's the job we built Photo Collage for. Below is how to do it on iPhone, start to finish. The limits are listed too, so you don't find them halfway through.
1. Get your clips ready first
Photo Collage uses each video as it is. There's no trimming inside the app. If you only want the best five seconds of a clip, trim it in the Photos app first: open the video, tap Edit, and drag the ends of the timeline.
For a collage, shorter clips usually work better anyway. People scroll past long ones.
2. Pick a layout by photo count
There are 219 layouts, from plain grids to shapes like hearts, stars, honeycomb, bento and film strip. The layout picker shows real thumbnails, has a search, and opens on layouts that fit the number of photos and clips you've added.
So with two photos and two clips, you start on layouts with four cells. That cuts the list down to a handful you can actually compare.
One tip: give a video the biggest cell. Most phone videos are shot vertically, so a tall cell down one side works well. That's what the layout in the screenshot above does, with the sea clip in the tall cell on the right.
3. Add photos and videos
Photos and videos go into the same layout, so you can mix them however you like. Add them all at once: they fill the cells in order. If you picked more than the layout has room for, the extras wait below the collage. Switch to a layout with more cells and they move in.
4. Put each clip in the right cell
The first order is rarely the one you want. Press and hold a photo or a clip and drag it onto another cell to swap the two. Its crop and filter go with it.
If one item is wrong, Replace swaps just that one. For photos, "Fit whole photo" shows the entire picture in its cell, so nobody's head gets cut off. Reset position resets how it sits in the cell.
Think about the order of the cells too. A before and after, or two angles of the same moment, reads best side by side. A short story, like arriving, the main event and leaving, reads best from left to right or top to bottom.
5. Decorate it, or don't
This is the step that makes birthday, wedding and memorial collages feel personal. There are 12 frames for the whole collage, from Minimal and Polaroid to Film and seasonal ones like Summer sun. Behind the cells you can use a colour, a gradient, one of your photos blurred, or your own image. Text comes with 41 fonts, so you can add a name or a date.
The sticker sheet has emoji and stickers in categories, with search and your recents.
A little goes a long way, though. On a video collage the clips already do most of the work. One line of text and a frame is usually enough.
6. Save it as a video
When the collage has a video in it, you save it as a video: HEVC at 1080p or 720p, or Compatible H.264 if the place you're posting to won't play HEVC. From there you can post it or send it anywhere that takes video.
If the collage has only photos, you get an image instead. Either way, the collage stays in My collages in the app, so you can reopen it and keep editing later.
What it can't do
We'd rather you know this before you start:
- No 4K. Video export tops out at 1080p. That's fine for social posts and messages. It's not the tool for a 4K edit.
- No trimming in the app. Trim clips in Photos first, as in step 1.
- Some extras are Premium. HDR video export on supported iPhones, print sizes and custom sizes need Premium.
If those limits work for you, the whole thing takes a few minutes. Most of that time goes into picking the photos, which is the part no app can do for you.