Hands-on with Instagram’s new Layout app: Making selfie and cat collages is a breeze

The best thing you can say about an app is that it’s easy and intuitive, and that it helps you do things you were never able to do before.

Using those criteria, I’d have to say that Instagram’s new Layout app, which it launched today for iOS and which lets you make collages out of photos in your camera roll, is a success. In less than 30 minutes, I’ve gone from being a collage novice to a bona fide pro.

Okay, that may be an overstatement, but it’s no exaggeration to say that after just a few minutes playing with Layout, I was making collages like a boss.

The stand-alone app, which operates independent of Instagram — although it allows you to share your collages to Instagram and Facebook (but not Twitter) with a single click — takes just seconds to understand.

To start with, you have to agree to give Layout access to your camera roll.

Above: Resizing, and changing the orientation of photos, is easy in Layout.

Image Credit: Daniel Terdiman/VentureBeat

You can select from your entire roll, but if you want to focus on photos of people, the app has a “Faces” tool that algorithmically presents just those kinds of pictures (though I did note that in my roll, a photo of a sculpture with a very realistic face passed muster). It also has a “Recents” tool that shows all the photos you’ve selected for previous collages.

Whichever filter you choose (or don’t, if you go with your whole-hog roll), you simply scroll through the photos, tapping the ones you want to include in a collage. With each one you tap, you see it appear in the top third of the screen, combined with any others you’ve selected.

Layout gives you lots of different choices for the look of your collage. They range from organizing the photos into squares, to making them all horizontal bars, to one single big photo above a group of small ones, to a series of vertical bars, and more. All told, there are 16 possible layout choices.

Once you’ve picked the layout style, you still have lots of control over how the collage looks. You can select and resize each of the individual photos, and you can move them around by simply tapping a picture, holding it, and dragging it into the spot you want. You can also swap out a photo by clicking the Replace button, and you can flip a photo either left to right, or upside down with the Mirror and Flip buttons, respectively.

Choosing how to size the individual images takes a bit of experimentation, especially because doing so means figuring out exactly how each picture should be framed. For me, naturally, that meant making sure my cats’ faces were always visible. Because cats.

If you decide you don’t like what you’ve created using an individual collage layout, you can click the app’s back arrow, which returns you to the full list of layouts, where you can choose a different one. Or, if you’ve decided you’re not happy with your creation at all, you can click the X in the upper left hand corner, and abandon your work altogether. But if you like what you’ve created, you tap “Done,” and it both saves the finished collage into your camera roll and offers you choices for sharing it. Again, given Instagram’s long-standing cold war with Twitter, the micro-blogging service is not an option.

Having never created photo collages using a mobile app before, I wasn’t sure what the best themes around which to build them would be. Obviously, I had to make one with pictures of my cats. Then I took a bunch of pictures from a recent hike I did and put those together. But I’ve got 4,340 photos in my camera roll at the moment, so I found it a little overwhelming to decide what should go in my collages. I ended up choosing some pictures I took out the window during a recent flight to Texas, as well as one built from a collection of selfies. And for fun, I made a collage out of three previous collages.

Above: A collage of collages, made with Layout

Image Credit: Daniel Terdiman/VentureBeat

It’s hard to imagine anyone needing more than a few minutes to figure out how to use Layout. And the app is fun to play with, so I can see using it a lot in the future, especially to put together collages from events, hikes, parties, and so on. And I assume that’s exactly what Instagram had in mind when they created this.

I have to give Instagram’s developers props for making Layout so simple. It could be much more complicated to use, but if it was, a lot of people — myself included — would get frustrated and abandon it in minutes. No doubt, that was the mandate: Make it simple enough that anyone from a kid to an 80-year-old can figure it out in seconds.

Given Instagram’s huge user base of more than 300 million users, and despite the fact that Layout isn’t yet available for Android, expect to see a flood of collages in your social feeds from here on out.

Some of them may even be from me.