Creating a Photo Collage In Freeform

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to create a photo collage using the Freeform format. 

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In the past I've showed you how to create photo collages in a variety of different apps like Photos, Pages, and Keynote. But you can also now create them in the Freeform App. 

So in Freeform I'm going to create a new board here. Freeform doesn't have a page size or edges or anything. It's just one big blank canvas that stretches off infinitely in many directions. So we can create something here without having to set anything up in advance. To add a photo you can certainly use Insert and then Photos or Videos. But you can also just Drag and Drop. For instance I've got the Photos App open here and I can drag and drop from the Photos App into Freeform and then the photo will just import in. You could also do the same with files. I've got some some files here in the Finder and I can drag and drop one of those in as well. You can see the result is the same. So wherever you have your photos just bring them into Freeform by dragging and dropping. 

Now once they are in you can easily move them around by clicking and dragging them. You can also easily resize them by selecting one. Then you've got these 4 dots on each corner. You can grab a dot and you can enlarge or shrink the photo. You can also rotate photos by moving your pointer over one of the blue dots, holding the Command Key down, and then dragging. Then you can rotate it like that. Hold the Shift Key down it will stick to 45 degree increments.

Now there a few default things about the photos that you can change. You can see them if you go to Format and here you can see Shadow and there is a slight drop shadow. You can see I can turn if Off there if I don't want that effect. You've also got round corners. You can turn that Off and you can see the corners are now squared off. You can do that for multiple photos at the same time. So I can select both of these and say that I want no shadow and I want to turn off rounded corners. You can see you don't have to do it per photo. As a matter of fact you can select a photo like this, go to Format and then you can Save it as the Insert Style. So the next photo you insert will have no shadow and the square corners. 

You can also Crop your photos. So if I don't have it selected yet I can Click once to select and right away I should see some buttons down here. If I don't see them I can just click Get and they should appear. Now this first button here allows you to Resize to the original size which would be really large or replace the photo. So if you've set a specific position for a photo and you don't want to have to bring a new one in and set it to the same position you can just replace the existing photo inside this frame. 

The second button here is the Cropping button. You have a variety of controls that should be familiar to you if you've ever done this in other apps like Pages. So the slide over here allows you to zoom in. Once you've zoomed in you can actually drag around to get the image where you want inside of the frame. It also switched to Cropping and cropping then allows you to grab the edges, like this. So you can actually go in another ratio like that. You can still drag around and zoom in like that. So after you manipulate those and get everything like you want you can click Done. 

Now you can also mask with another type of shape besides a rectangle or rounded rectangle. With the image selected if you go to Format and then Image you can go to Mask the Shape. You can choose from a variety of shapes here. So, for instance, if I wanted to put this image inside of an oval I can. Now you can see it is in a circle there. I have the same cropping tools here. They appear automatically. So I can move the image around. I can grab the shape here and change it like that. I can switch to this mode and then just move this photo around and resize it or scale it as I want to get the photo to fit in there. Then click Done and you can see now I've got the photo in a different kind of frame. But you can go even further than that. If you start with the shape, so I'm going to click the Shapes Button here, and then choose something completely different. For instance I'll choose this shape right here. It is just going to give me this regular shape that I can use in a variety of different ways. But one of the things I can do is I can use this as a frame for an image. So I'm going to drag an image into this and it is going to insert it inside of that shape. It's going to mask it with that shape. So let's zoom in a little bit here and click Done. You can see I've placed it in there. So you can really use any shape that you want that is in here or you can draw your own shape with the pen tool there to any frame that you like. Then once you've got that you can drag an image into it and position it as you want and then mask a photo inside of any shape. 

Now the one thing that it appears you can't do is you can't create a border around an image. So let's drag this image in here. If I just use the standard frame like that there's really nothing I can do here to add a border. It doesn't allow it. There's no border setting. In addition if you used one of these shapes, so let's go with the basic shape here and one of these rounded rectangles. I drag that same image into this you would think you would be able to add a border here. But, in fact, you still can't. There is no border option. However since I created one shape like this I can certainly create another one. So I've created a second shape here. I'm going to place it on top of this one and if I click on this once I've got the fill and border for the shape that is at top. So I'll click here and I'm going to set the filled to No Fill. I'm going to set the border here to a regular border and I'm going to make it like 4 points black. So now I've got a border here It is actually two shapes. One on top of the other. Once I've got that done in order to move them both together very easily I can select them both by dragging over both and I go to Arrange and group them. So now it is one shape here. Now let's say I want to add some captions. So you can add any text you want, anywhere you want. So I'm going to drag this image in here and then I'm going to make it a little bit larger here so we can work with it a bit better. Let's say I want to add a caption to that. I can click here to add a textbox and I can move this textbox wherever I want. So I'm going to put it here at the bottom, stretch it to along the bottom like that and I can enter in my text. Now I can use a regular caption like that but I can also drag it on top of the image. So I can put it like there. Let's now go and change the color to white. Let's change this to bold and let's make it a little bit bigger as well. So I could have it there or I can position it anywhere I want on the photo. If I want the two to move together I can certainly select them both and group them as before. 

Once you group things they work really well for moving and they work really well if you want to rotate the group. But the text doesn't really work great for scaling. So you can see Freeform doesn't really handle that very well. So a quick and easy way to create a  collage is to go to an album you've created and select the photos that you want. I'm going to select these five. You can drag them all in at once. Then after they have all imported you've got all these photos here. Now you can position them. So notice how things snap really nicely and make it very easy to align. So I can snap them all like that and position them. If I need to move things up and down a different level I can select it and then go to Arrange and I can bring forward, bring to front, or send backwards, or bring to back. Let's bring this to the front like that. I love to do a little border around this so I'm going to go ahead and create a shape here and it should snap to it. But notice that the rounded edges aren't quite the same. I'm going to zoom in using the trackpad or you can use the Control down here and now if you use the green dot here to match the radius of the curve and then I'm going to select this and I'm going to change the Fill to No Fill and then I'm going to change the border to 4 pixels here and make it white and then it kind of creates a little bit of separation there. I'm going to add a caption here. So I'm going to add some text. I'm going to put it right here at the bottom of the center photo and I'm going to put some text there. Select it. Make it Bold. Make the color white like that. Maybe make it a little bit bigger. Then I'm going to position this like that. Then I'm going to select all three of these. The Border, the photo behind it, and the text and I'm going to Group it. Then I'm going to use the rotation here, holding the Command Key down and rotating this slightly like that. 

Now I've got a good collage here that I want to use. It's nice to look at it in Freeform but it would be great if I could actually send it to somebody in a Message, an email, or maybe post it online. So a really simple way to do that is to select everything by either dragging over it or just using Command A to select it All and then Command C to Copy. Now that I've copied I can go to another app and just Paste it in. So, for instance here I am in the Messages App and if I paste you can see it pastes the collage there. I didn't have to save a file or anything. Similarly in the Mail App if I just paste it to the body here you could see it pastes. Note that when you're attaching images in Mail you always want to check image size here and make sure it is set to what you want. This is a pretty small image already so I only have Small or probably a little smaller than normal for actual size. But a lot of times people choose something too small and then the resolution isn't that good. So choose the right thing. 

What about saving this as a file? We can easily create a PDF by going to File, Export As PDF, and then Save it here. I'm just going to put it on the Desktop. You can see here it is. If I double click on it it opens up in Preview and I've a got a pretty nice PDF of this image here. It is pretty good resolution. 

What about as an Image? There is no export as an image option. But you can go to Print and under Print, where it says PDF, click on that and then Open In Preview. This creates a PDF opened in Preview without saving it. So you don't have an extra file laying around. Once you're in Preview you can go to File and then Export. Then one of the export options you've got is JPEG. So now you can save this as a JPEG. You can even choose the resolution here. So I can create, say, a smaller JPEG file by setting this something lower. I'm going to save it here to the Desktop. So I can see here is that JPEG. I double click on it to open it in Preview. You can see it here. You can see the resolution is pretty low because I set it that way. If I kept it at 300 it would be a lot finer. Also note that in Preview here if you want to crop it a little better because Freeform does create a bit of a margin around the edges, you can click on the Markup Tools here. Then click on the Selection Tool. Then select the area that you want to Crop to. Once you've got that set then all you need to do is do Command K, which is Tools Crop, and it will crop it. Now when you go to Export as a JPEG image and you Save it you can see this new one here is cropped much tighter. 

So those are the basics. Keep in mind that you can add all sorts of other things, like for instance you can go and add other shapes or you can add arrows and point to things. With text you can not only add text but you can use Control Command Space or the fn and e key and then add different emoji characters if you like. Then just size those up pretty large and now you can have little stickers that you can place on your collage as well. 

Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.