With Layout, Instagram has taken a similar approach to collages as Hyperlapse did for time lapse videos: a simple interface with with rich features that will appeal to casual and power users alike.
If you take a lot of photos — as many collage-makers do — quickly finding the ones you want can be a challenge. Instagram has included three different tabs to quickly sort your images: all, recents and faces. Faces is able to detect people in images and only displays photos that have people in them. When you add one of these to a collage, the app does another neat trick: it automatically centers the image based on the location of the face. Of course, you can always manually adjust the position of the image within the collage, but it's a handy feature to have this automated.
Alternatively, you can use the "photo booth" function to take a series of rapid-fire selfies (up to four) to automatically populate your collage. This feature only work's with your iPhone's front-facing camera so you can't use flash or set the time between shots, but it could be useful for spontaneous photo opps (the individual photos taken within the app are also automatically saved to your camera roll)
You can also make more artistic adjustments by using the flip and mirror tools. The flip function rotates the photo upside down and the mirror function creates a reflection of the image. These sound like pretty basic image editing features (they are), but when you use them in a collage it opens up some pretty creative possibilities. For example, the collage below is actually two different images used nine times. I mirrored the photos in the far-left column to make it look like one connected landscape image, which gives the photos a look I couldn't otherwise achieve.
To find the apps you can share to, tap "more," scroll all the way to the right and select "more" to switch on additional sharing extensions. Twitter is, predictably, absent from this list, but you can work around this by saving the collage to your camera roll (which happens automatically when you save a collage) and sharing it directly through the Twitter app.
Whether Instagram's backing will be enough to get their wide user base to adopt the collage app remains to be seen. Other apps, like PicFrame and Pic Stitch, beat Instagram to launch by years and already have a large number of users. But Instagram seems to have struck the right balance of simplicity and features to appeal to its base so it could eventually draw some of those users away from the competition.
The free app is iPhone only for now, though the company says an Android version is coming in the next few months.
IMAGE: MASHABLE COMPOSITE/INSTAGRAM
