Instagram has just introduced a brand new application called Layout, designed for making and sharing photo collages.
Last year, Instagram released Hyperlapse, an app which took time lapse videos and now it has taken on the popular photo collage. Layout has user-friendly features and analysts believe it is going to be another hit for the social media giant.
Instagram’s Layout is very simple to operate. Instagram knows that its users love taking lots of photos so it made it very easy for Layout users to select the photos they want added to a collage. Layout has three tabs that will help users sort through all of their images: all, faces and recent. The all tab obviously displays all the photos on the user’s phone, the faces tab displays just the photos that have people’s faces and the recent tab is also self-explanatory. What’s cool about the app when choosing photos from the faces tab is the fact that the Layout app automatically centers the image based on where the face is located.
Once you have selected the photos you want to put into your collage, Layout automatically arranges them for you. The best part about Layout is how easy it is to tweak the collage to your taste. You can rearrange the photos in the collage by simply dragging them to the preferred position. You can resize the photos and even make last-minute replacements with the help of the replace tool. There is even a mirror tool and a flip one. The flip will rotate the photo upside down and the mirror function will make your mirror reflection of your photo.
There is also a Photo Booth function that takes a series of up to four selfies and then turns them into a collage. Users should know that the Photo Booth function only works with an iPhone’s from camera, which means that you cannot use flash. The individual photos taken by the Layout app in Photo Booth mode are saved to the camera roll.
Once you’ve finished your collage, you can share it on Facebook or Instagram. There is no Twitter integrated, but thanks to the app automatically saving the collage to your camera roll, you can share it from there.
Whether or not Layout is going to be a hit remains to be seen. Experts believe that Instagram’s backing is going to help the app get more exposure, but there are already many photo collage apps, such as Pic Stitch and PicFrame that have been around for years and have a huge number of users.
What helps Layout and will most definitely make the app stand out among a plethora of photo collage apps is its simplicity. Everything about the features of the app and the experience is simple and highly user-friendly.
While the app is free, at this moment, Instagram’s Layout is only available on iOS. The company said that it plans to release it for Android in the next few months.
