Making a collage

A trip comes home with hundreds of photos, and the one you send to the family chat or stick on the fridge is usually a handful of them on one picture. littledots makes that picture from the photos already on your trip, and keeps it with the trip it came from.

Starting a collage

Pick between two and twenty photos, on the Photos tab or in a trip's gallery. Hold one to start selecting, then tap the rest, and tap Create in the bar along the bottom. The collage asks for a shape first: Story for a phone screen, Square, or Portrait for a feed.

The photos arrive scattered across the canvas like prints on a table. Everything after that happens on the canvas and in the panel under it.

Moving things around

Drag a photo to move it. It snaps to the edges of the canvas and to the photos around it, so lining things up takes no effort. The round handle on a selected photo makes it bigger or smaller and turns it, and on a phone two fingers do the same with a pinch and a twist.

Tap a photo and the panel shows what you can change about that one: its size, its rotation, its frame, and where it sits in the stack. Change swaps it for another photo, and the arrangement stays as it is.

Arranging all of them

Photo arrangement lays every photo out again: Scattered, Tidy grid or Masonry. Shuffle mixes up the order, and Tilt turns every photo a little, the way prints never quite land straight. In a grid or masonry, Gap sets the space between them.

Every photo can go into a polaroid frame at once, and every photo can get a soft shadow. The background is a single color or a gradient of two.

Flags, emoji and text

Add element puts something on top of the photos: an Emoji, a Flag, Text, or the littledots Logo. Text comes in three fonts, with an outline or a shadow when it sits on a busy photo. Flags can also go on every photo at once, in the corner you pick, which is a nice way to show a trip through several countries.

Changing several at once

Hold a photo, a flag or a line of text to start picking several, then tap the others you want. With several picked, you can line them up, space them evenly, give them the same size, or shuffle and tilt just those. Select all, and Select all of a kind at the end of the panel, pick everything or every one of a kind for you.

To take something off, pick it and hold Hold to remove at the end of the panel. Undo and redo are at the top right, for every change you make.

Finishing and sharing

Finish saves the collage. Made in the app, it is online, on all your devices, and counts toward your storage like a photo. Made in a browser, you can also keep it in that browser alone.

Everything you have made is under Creations, at the top of the Photos tab. Open one and Share or save sends it on or saves the picture, Edit opens it again, and Remix starts a new collage from it.

When every photo in a collage comes from one trip, the collage can go on that trip too: Share with and the trip's name. Everyone on the trip then sees it with the trip's photos. Stop sharing with takes it off again. Sharing needs you to be able to add photos to the trip, so organizers and contributors can, and guests cannot, the same as for photos in Shared travel.