Shape Collage

The best advantage of making a photo collage on a PC is that you don't have to cut up your favourite pictures. Shape Collage is a free collage program with some good tricks up it's sleeves.

The interface is simple and easy to follow with three steps visible at all times. Moving from left to right, the first step is to select the photos for the project.

There is a file browser but we found it easier to simply drag and drop the photos onto the Photos space.

Clicking on the Preview button showed how the photos will be arranged and then the Create button saves the arrangement as a JPEG, PNG or Photoshop PSD.

The final section to the right has all of the advanced settings.

You can change the shape of the collage from a square to a circle, heart or text. There is even an option to draw a custom shape that can be saved to use another time.

Either the size of the photo or the size of the final image can be adjusted.

A colour can be added to the background or you can use another photo. There are more advanced settings such as the rotation of the photos, and the shadows used for each one.

It's not all good though. We found it could be a little slow with large numbers of photos and it had problems when we tried to set the Photo Spacing to nought per cent.

Even so, this is an excellent free utility.