Create A Photo Collage With Pages On a Mac

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's make a photo collage using Pages.

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So in Pages let's start with a blank basic template. First we'll go in and change to Page Layout under File, Convert to Page Layout. Next let's go to Document and then we'll turn off the Header and the Footer. Now let's go into File, Page Setup and set the document size. You can do that under Paper Size, Manage Custom Sizes. So let's go and hit the Plus button and create a new one and call this one Poster. I'm going to set the width and height. I'm going to use inches here for the United States but the same thing applies if you're using metrics. So let's go and create something that's going to be 20 wide by 16 high. So a small poster. I'll set the non printable area here to 0.25 all the way around. Hit OK. Then I'll hit OK here.

You could see in the document sidebar it's now set to Other paper size and you could see it's 20 by 16 so it automatically goes to Landscape since it's wider than it is tall. Next let's go to View and then turn on Show Layout. Now let's zoom out so we can see the entire thing. If this was a larger document this is what we would need here. But we could go to 50% here and it still all fits in. Now let's go to View and Show Rulers. Now that we see the Rulers let's set up some margins. We don't need to do anything in the actual document setting up margins. We're just going to set some guides here so we don't go too close to the edge. So I'm going to drag from the left ruler over to one inch and do that on all the sides. Great. 

Now we're ready to add some boxes for photos to go into. Instead of dropping photos directly in here we're going to create some shapes. So start off with let's create a collage that has no borders between the photos. The photos go right up into each other. That makes the math easy. We know this is 20" wide and there are one inch margins on either side. So it's 18" across. 16" vertically with one inch borders on either side is 14". So we're 18 by 14. 

So let's use Spotlight to do the math. Command Space brings up Spotlight. If we do 18" and let's say we have 5 photos across. So that's 3.6" horizontally. Vertically it's going to be 14" and if we do 5 vertically, so a 5x5 grid, it's 2.8.  So 3.6 by 2.8. Let's click on Shape here and we're going to use the square to start with. It puts it in the middle. If I go to Format and then Arrange I can set the width and height. So let's set that to 3.6" wide and 2.8"  high. Now I'm going to drag it to the upper left and have it lock to those guides that we set there. Now I can Copy and Paste or Option Drag to create a copy. I lock the left side to the right side of the one before it. I'm going to continue to do that to create five across. 

Now I don't have to do that for all of them because now I can drag and select around to get all five of those. Option drag down to create the next row and create all five rows. I want to make sure I always see that yellow line at the top. So you can see it locks perfectly the top to the bottom of the previous row. If you don't do it perfectly, you see now the yellow line is now at the bottom, it's going to create a little bit of an extra space there. See that. We don't want that. So make sure you lock the yellow line to the top as you're dragging. It takes a little practice.

Now we've got a 5 by 5 grid. It's kind of hard to see each one. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to click to select the second one there and then Command click to select the fourth one here. Then I'm going to do basically a checkerboard. Selecting every other one on each row like that. Then I'm going to go to Style and change the style to something like blue. Now I've created a nice checkerboard to make it easier for me to see each individual box to drag and drop a photo into it.

So now let's go and bring up the Photos app. Before I do that let's move Pages so it's just showing this on the right. I don't need to see the thumbnails here so I'm going to go and View, Document Only. So no thumbnails there on the right side and I don't need to see the Sidebar, right now, so I can turn that off. Now I click and Hold the green button here and if I hold the Option key down you can see the tile changes to Move. So I can move this to the right side of the screen. It's not going to make it a split screen or full screen, or anything. It just making it a window that's using exactly half the screen.

Now, let's launch the Photos app. I'm going to do the same thing here. Option click the green button and then now Move window to the left side of the screen. So now that I can see both the Pages document and my photos in the Photos app I can drag and drop to create the collage. So let's pick a first image here and I'm going to drag and drop it into one of these boxes. Make sure you drag it into it. Now I can scale this down and move it around as I want right away or I can save that work until later. Then I can hit Done or just click away.

If I were to select something and then drag and accidentally put it outside of the box it's going to insert it as a new element. I don't want that. I always want it to be inside one of these boxes. So I'll drag this in here and I'll continue to work with that. Dragging each photo into each slot. So now that I've got all the photos in place I can enlarge this window again just to see the entire collage. Now this looks great as is with all the photos right up against each other. But we can also separate them a little bit with some space. Now we could have done that by creating smaller boxes and spacing them evenly apart when we started. 

But instead it was easy to start by having them all up against each other like this. Now we can add the spaces later on. So to do that first let's click and select around to create a whole box around these so we have them all selected. Let's go to the Format sidebar and go to Arrange. Under Arrange we're going to resize them. So let's turn off Constrain proportions so we can set the horizontal and vertical sizes differently. Let's go and set the size. Let's take it down a ½" so instead of 3.6 wide it's 3.1. Instead of 2.8 high let's do 2.3. You can see this resizes them and does it nicely except we have a lot of extra space on the right side and the bottom now.

So to get rid of that we're just going to select the photos on the right side and move them so that they lock to the right guide. We're going to do the same thing with the bottom. Move those so they lock to the bottom. Now we're going to select each row, like that, and we're going to do Arrange, Distribute Objects Horizontally. That will evenly distribute them across. We need to do that the same for each one of these rows. Now we need to do that for the columns. Select the first column. Do Arrange, Distribute Objects Vertically and for every other column. 

Now that we're got that done we could leave it like this or we could use the extra space for borders. So I'm going to select all of the photos again and I'm going to go to Style. Here I can set a border. So I can choose a line border. You can see it puts a color border around it. We can select the color we want. We can select the size we want and have a nice border around each one. We could also, instead of selecting a line, go to Picture Frame and use a picture frame like that. We have a bunch of different styles to choose from. Some will be better than others for what we want. Some will overlap because we don't have quite enough space in there. Let's go and stick with the original one right here.

Now if you want to set the background color for the entire thing you could click on the background, some place where there isn't a photo. Then make sure you're on the Format sidebar and then change the background to something else. So you can do all sorts of different types of Fills. Let's do a simple color fill. I'll click on the Color Wheel here and select a nice color. If you're going to be printing this you may want to stick with a white background as a fill like this will take up a lot of ink.

Now I'll show you how to do other styles besides just this grid in a minute. But when you're done with this you're going to want to print it or export it as an image. Let's say you want to print it. Well then, of course, you'll need a printer that will print a paper this large. If you made this 

8½ by 11 you could just print it on a regular printer. Otherwise you could use a printing service. Those might be closer than you think as large office supply stores and UPS and FedEx stores and places like that will print PDF's for you. So you could go and export this. File, Export To, PDF. Create a PDF here and take that PDF into the store or sometimes you can logon online and send it to the store and then just go and pickup the print.

So you can see here I've opened up this PDF here in Preview. You can see it's pretty detailed there so it's going to look pretty good on a print. Now if your goal instead was to actually share this as an image, say share it online, email it to friends, post it to social media, you may notice that there's no Export To image in Pages. All you need to do is go to Print and then from Print choose from the PDF menu here, Open in Preview. This will open up the document here in Preview and then you could go from here to File, Export, and you can change to JPEG, PNG, or other image options. Let's do a JPEG here. Now you get to choose the resolution. So you can do the math on this to see how big the image will be. Remember this was 20" wide. So at 300 pixels per inch it's going to be 6000 pixels wide which is a nice high resolution image. But if you want something smaller maybe you can do with 100 pixels per inch and this will create something that's only 2000 pixels wide. 

Let's take a look at that and see what this looks like. At that resolution, if you zoom in you're going to see some pixelation. But if you zoom out to see them all they look pretty decent and the images aren't going to be too big. This one is only 800K. Pretty decent for sharing online a little quick collage of a bunch of photos. But for something a little nicer maybe stick with about something 300 dots per inch.

So let's say you don't want a grid but actually you want to be more creative how you create your collage. Instead of just choosing a square shape and then resizing that, I can choose any shape I want. So, for instance, I could start off with a circle and make it into, say, an oval and stick that right here in the middle. I can drag and drop a photo into that. Then I could take another shape, maybe a square, and have that be on this edge here and make that like this. Take another one, maybe a rounded rectangle, and put that over here. I could do all sorts of things. I could even create things at an angle. So I could create a shape here, go to Arrange, and then set the angle to something. I could just keep creating as much as I want to create a collage. I could even overlap photos.

So let me drop some images in here. You could see now if I move this one here it goes underneath there. So you want to go to Arrange, Bring Forward will bring it forward one step. You have to keep doing that to actually bring it forward to the step that takes it ahead of this one. Bring to Front brings it all the way to the front. You can see it's grayed out now because it is the frontmost. You can do Send Backwards to send back one step or Send it Back to send it all the way to the background. So you can do this. 

You can create borders for each one. Maybe a border might look good, say, on this one here so that as other things are underneath it it sets it apart. You could even create a border that's the same color as the background. I could select this one and I can change the border to white and you could see how it cuts out a piece of that image there making a nice effect. If I were to create a shadow for this one here it will actually cast a shadow on the images below it.

A couple of things to pay attention to. Notice that the image here is perfectly vertical even though I rotated the shape. If you rotate the shape before you put the image in, the image won't be rotated at all inside of the rotated shape. But if you put the image in first and then rotate the shape it will rotate the image inside it. Another thing is if you want to change what image is inside there you can't drag and drop anymore. Dragging and dropping only works the first time. So now you have to go to Image and then hit Replace and select a new image. You can now select something from the Finder, Drag and Drop something in here from the Finder, or Drag and Drop from Photos. That works too. If you Drag and Drop from Photos it links to the image inside the library and you can use Open there and select that image.

Another thing you can do is you can adjust the images. I can select an image like this one here and under Format, Image I can hit the Enhance button or I can hit this button here and use the Image Adjustments to change the image. It won't change the original. It just changes what you see here inside of this collage. So really it's just a matter of how much time you want to spend making the collage. Doing a grid is the quickest way. But if you want to get really creative and use all sorts of shapes and have things overlapping and such then you're going to have to spend more time with it to get exactly what you want. But you can create anything!