How To Create a Photo Collage On a Mac

You can use either Pages or Keynote to build a photo collage. Pages is better suited to printing and exporting PDFs. Keynote is best for creating collages to be shared online or viewed on your screen. Both apps have the same tools so building a collage is similar in either app.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to create photo collages on your Mac. 
MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 1000 supporters. Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you can read more about the Patreon Campaign. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts.
So while the Photos App doesn't have a feature to allow you to easily build collages you can use Pages or Keynote to do this. Pages is great if your goal is to print out the collage. Keynote is great if your goal is to share the collage online or show it on your screen. Pages for paper and Keynote for the screen. But the skills you need to build a collage in either of those are exactly the same. 
Let's start off with Pages. Let's select the blank landscape template. It's easy to switch between landscape and portrait though. Just go to Documents and there you can find Page Orientation and you can see I've got Landscape selected but I could go to Portrait if I wanted to.  Now let's make it easier to work with. This isn't a regular word processing document. We're going to use Page Layout instead. So go to File and Convert to Page Layout and get rid of the body text. Then let's Zoom out of it so we can see the entire page. Now also while we're here in Document we can turn off the Header and the Footer. So those are out of the way. So now we just have a blank page to work with. Now let's add our first photo. You can add photos from the Finder or from the Photos App. So here in the Finder I've got a photo here. I'm going to simply drag and drop that into the Pages document. Now I can move it around. I can grab a corner and resize it to get the approximate size that I need. Let's add a border to it. I'm going to go to Format and then Style and you'll see some options here. These are preset styles. But you can choose from a wide variety of borders by clicking Border here and going to Picture Frame. Then click here and you could see all the different picture frames. So you can choose something like this, for instance, or something like this. I'm going to choose this basic one right here to make it look like it's its own photo sitting on top of a piece of paper. You can see a bit of shadow here. You can set the scaling for the border. I'm going to go down to 60% like that. 
Now typically with a photo collage you want to have things at slightly different angles. Not everything is just going to be straight kind of like the photos were thrown on there. So I'm going to go to anyone of the side or corner dot, hold the Command key down and drag and I can change the angle. So let's change it to something like that and I can move it around. Now notice how it is kind of snapping to the sides and all. If you drag and while you're dragging hold the Command key down it will no longer snap to the sides. So I can kind of get it to fit just where I want it so it's not touching the edges here. If your printer doesn't print all the way to the edge you may want to have a little extra space like that. 
Now let's add another photo but this time from the Photos App. So here in the Photos App I'm going to grab another photo. Do this so I can see both windows and I can drag and drop from the Photos App directly into Pages. Let's do the same thing here. I'm going to shrink this down a bit. I'm going to select the same type of border here. To make that easy I'm going to create a Style. So with this selected I go to Format, Style and I've got these six default styles here. I'll page over the next one and use Plus. This will add my own style. So now I can select this, click there, and I get the same style for this photo. So now I can resize this one, Command Drag, and give it a bit of an angle there. Let me have one overlap the other like that. Now let me go and add three more photos like this. So now I've got this little collage with overlapping photos.
Let's add a background now. If I go to Format with nothing else selected then I'll be able to set a background Fill here. So let's go. We can do a color fill like that. We can do something nicer like a gradient fill. Let's do an Advanced Gradient Fill and set it to Radial like that. Then we can change to these colors here. So we can maybe make this one in the center closer to white. I'll leave the other one to this darker blue. So now we have kind of a background here. 
Now having overlapping photos is nice but what you may want to have is each photo individually on the page. So let's shrink everything down like this. If we shrink it enough nothing overlaps anymore. Now what if we want to have a caption under each photo. First let's straighten everything out instead of having it at an angle. We can put it back at an angle later. So I'm going to select everything. Go to Arrange and I can see here under Rotation, it's kind of a gray value there, so that means that there are Multiple Values. If I set it to zero that means everything is now straight. Let's add TextBox by clicking there. Put that underneath one of the photos like that. Let's make it Bold and a little bit bigger. Center it and stick it right underneath like that. Now I'm going to take that and I'm going to Option Drag and add it to each one of these. Some of them I'm going to have to resize. So now I've got it under each one of these. I could add whatever caption I want. Now to rotate them we want to rotate with the caption. So I'm going to select and then go to Arrange and Group or Option Command G. So I can select this one. Option Command G. Do that for each one of these. This will not only allow me to rotate them together but I could also resize them together. So now I can rotate these again like that and get something nice like that. We can add more text like maybe a title here. I'm going to shrink these down a bit more like that. Add some more text here. Put it at the top. Make it nice and big and stretch it all the way across. You could even add other things like shapes here. Let's add a car and an RV like that. We can change the color of these. Change this color to dark blue. Maybe these to the same thing like that. Then we could adjust as we want. 
So there are other things you can do here. For instance if you want to crop a photo you don't even need to go back to the Photos App. So these are grouped. I'm going to double click to enter the group. So now I'm just selecting the photo. Double click on the photo and now I can adjust the zoom and change the part of the photo that's shown and do it that way. I can also adjust other things by going to Image and there's the Exposure and Saturation. You could also just use the Enhance button here or click here and you get a whole bunch of different ways that you can change this image. Then when you're done Save it. Now you would probably normally want to Print this. Another thing you could do with it is to Export as a PDF. The great thing about exporting it as a PDF and you get to select the Image Quality, since this is a collage the whole point is the photos, we'll select Best and then we'll export it as a PDF here. Then you could see the collage right there and it can be viewed by anybody with a PDF viewer, so across platform. Not only that but the images are pretty high quality in here. They are way beyond what the screen needs so I can zoom in here and you could see the details in the photos. Anybody wanting to printout this PDF would get pretty good results.
It's not ideal for sharing though as the file size is pretty big. You can see this is 8M here with these five photos imbedded in a PDF. 
If your goal is to create a collage for the screen, so maybe for sharing or social network or somebody just getting it in an email and viewing it on their screen, you don't need all that detail. What you need is to be able to export something like a jpeg. Pages doesn't do that, at least not directly. However Keynote does do that. Keynote is much better suited for creating a collage meant for the screen. So in Keynote I'm going to choose the basic white presentation here. Get rid of the fields that are there and I'm going to go to Document and change the slide size to Custom. Now by default it's 1920 x 1080. So the same as a HDTV. You probably want something a little bit better than that. So let me do 3840 by 2160 which is equivalent to a 4K TV. So now with that I can add elements to here. It's much easier to begin here in Keynote. There's no switching over to page layout. There's no headers and footers to get rid of and other things like that. You're already creating something meant for the screen. But basically the steps are almost identical for doing it in Keynote. As a matter of fact you can even Copy and Paste from Pages into Keynote. 
But I'm going to create it here from scratch really quickly. So I'm going to take this one from a file and drop it in. Resize it. I'm going to go to Format and Border. Change it to a Picture Frame. Select that same kind of picture frame here. Going to add that as a Style. Then I'm going to add a caption underneath. Grab both of these and group them together. (adding additional photos and title.) I'm going to select the background of the slide there and let's change the color to advanced gradient and make it a radial fill there. Then change the colors just a little bit like that. You can even do some cool special effects here with the text. Like, for instance, this title here I can change the text color to an Image Fill and then I can drag and drop from the Photos App into it so let's, for instance, grab some of this right here and put that there and you could see it's got an image there. Let's now go ahead and do an outline, points there in black like that. Make it just a little bit interesting. We can also add a drop shadow to it. Make it differently. Try different things for the outline. Maybe a white outline like that. There we go! Now we've got the collage like we want it in Keynote. 
So let's Save it. Now with Keynote you can go to Export. You can export a PDF from here as well. But here you can also do images. So, let's go to Image and it's only one slide so Do All. We'll use jpeg so it's somewhat compressed and now we can export directly to a jpeg image. Now what we're going to get is a Folder because it's go to hold all the slides. There's only one slide so we'll drag that slide out here and then get rid of the folder. This is an image here. So if I look at the image it's a jpeg and if I zoom in here notice the level of detail isn't as great. But this is an image ready to be shared online. Like upload it to Facebook or something. 
Now if you want to create a collage for both uses you could do it in Pages and once you have the pdf you double click to open it in Preview. In Preview you're viewing the pdf but now you can go to File, Export and you could Export to jpeg. Then you could choose the quality and also the resolution. So, this is an 8 ½ by 11 sheet of paper. So it's 11 inches wide. So it's 300 pixels per inch. It's 3300 pixels wide. The image here, this jpeg image, was 3840 pixels wide but more or less in the same general area if we do 300. If we do something like 72 pixels per inch you get something that's about 800 pixels wide. So a much smaller image the quality is not going to be there. So you definitely want to use 150 or 300 or something like that in order to get a good image from a pdf. 
So in general you can use either Pages or Keynote to create these collages and the skills you need to build the collage are almost identical. It's just how you set it up and how you export from each one that's a little bit different. So I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 3 Responses to “How To Create a Photo Collage On a Mac”

Geir Arne Midtgaard

3 years ago

Hei thanks for your videos. They are very useful.
I do very much photo. I use Pages to make "PhotoAlbums" ( My Digital Albums)
From Pages I export in Pub fast layout because I have heard it can be opened on most systems. I learned from your video that Keynote and save as PDF will do the same.

Thanks.

nick

hi Gary, one frustrating thing in Pages is, when I right click on an image already placed on a page, and chose "Replace Image" it only points to media in the Photos app, doesn't seem to give yo a choice to navigate in a folder.

Gary Rosenzweig

nick: Use the Format, Image sidebar instead. The Replace button there lets you select a file.

Comments Closed.

How To Create a Photo Collage On a Mac

Comments: 3 Responses to “How To Create a Photo Collage On a Mac”

Welcome to MacMost

Free Weekly Newsletter

MacMost Online Courses

Keyboard Shortcuts PDF

Connect with MacMost

MacMost Sections

Popular Tutorials

Information