CollageIt

Available for Microsoft’s Windows operating system as well as for Apple’s Mac OS X, the PearlMountain Technology-developed application CollageIt helps you come up with beautiful looking picture collages. The most exciting thing about this application is the speed and ease of use – pick a template, load some images, shuffle them around, and you have a collage. You can choose what to do next with the collage: save it, send it via email, post it on Facebook – the choice is yours.

The Windows version of CollageIt can be installed on Windows 7 and previous editions all the way down to Win2000. To install the application you will have to download a 7.4MB executable, run it, and go through a standard setup wizard. The Mac version works with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and newer editions.

The collage you’re working on is displayed in a large pane in the middle of CollageIt’s interface. To the left there’s a list that presents the photos you selected to use in the collage while to the right there are some options to play with the layout. Down at the bottom you have several buttons, including the Choose Template, Random Layout and Export buttons.

When you start the CollageIt application you are invited to pick one of 15 collage templates. If you don’t like a template and you want to choose another one, you can do so by clicking the aforementioned Choose Template button (it’s in the bottom left hand corner). After you pick a template, you must select the images you want to use for the collage. Thumbnails of the selected images will be displayed in the Photo List on the left.

At this point you could take the easy route and take advantage of the Random Layout and Shuffle buttons. Hit Random Layout and the application will automatically select a random layout for your collage. Click the Shuffle button and the images displayed on the layout will be shuffled. Or you could do things yourself, and tweak the layout and arrange the images in the order you want.

Once you’re done, you can export your collage. There are several export options at your disposal: you can save the collage as an image, you can email the collage, you can set it as your desktop wallpaper, you can upload it to Flickr, and you can post it on Facebook.

CollageIt is free. Please note though that the free version puts a watermark on the output, doesn’t let you crop photos, and doesn’t let you create a collage larger than 2000x2000 pixels. To get rid of these limitations, you must upgrade to the paid CollageIt Pro.

Easily and rapidly come up with beautiful collages using the CollageIt application.