Skip to footer

Instagram crops out independent collage apps with free Layout app

Move over Pic Stitch: Instagram is releasing its own photo collage app.

|
Instagram
Instagram released a photo collage app named Layout.

For the past several years of Instagram’s booming popularity, users have turned to third-party apps to create Post-it size photo squares into collages, usually in exchange for hashtag advertising. (#PicStitch and #PhotoGrid are two popular photo collage apps and hashtags.)

Now it's time for #Layout.

On Friday, Instagram rolled out Layout, a standalone photo-editing app that lets users create mini-collages then share on any social-media app. This is the second time Instagram has bent to pressure from third-party accessory apps, and is another bid to keep its massive user base within the Instagram ecosystem, and not one of the million other photo-sharing apps that pop up regularly.

“From imagining mirrored landscapes to sharing multiple moments from an entire adventure, we’ve seen these kinds of visual storytelling happening on Instagram and we’re inspired by it,” Instagram says in a Tumblr blog post announcing the new feature. “With Layout, it’s easier than ever to unlock your creativity — and we can’t wait to see what you’ll make next.”

Here’s how it works.

When you open Layout, Instagram will show you 10 different layouts to choose from based on up to nine photos you select from your camera roll or gallery. There's also an option called “Faces” that will filter only photos with people (selfie collage anyone?). From there, you can customize your layout through drag-and-drop photo arrangement, pinching to zoom in on one part of a photo, and pulling photo edges to change the size of a picture. There is also a flip and rotation tool to create mirror-image effects.

Instagram is also adding a Photo Booth feature that lets you take four quick pictures and create your collage from those snapshots.

This move comes after the popularity of apps such as Photo Grid, Pic Stitch, and InstaFrame, which offer countless ways to customize photos and create photo collages. Already, 20 percent of Instagram’s 300 million users use a third-party photo collage app, according to Re/Code. Though Layout is also technically a separate app, the hope is that it becomes a tool that Insta-devotees will consider just an extension of the main app. Instagram had the same idea when it released Hyperlapse last summer, a standalone super-speed time-lapse app.

Instagram previously updated its features last summer when it debuted a host of new filters and advanced photo-editing tools in response to photographer-frequented apps such as VSCO and Camera+.

"Layout from Instagram" is available for free download on iOS, with an Android app to debut in coming months.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Instagram crops out independent collage apps with free Layout app
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2015/0323/Instagram-crops-out-independent-collage-apps-with-free-Layout-app
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe