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Photo Grid for Android review: Your go-to app for creating paneled collages

It's no secret that Google Play is overflowing with Android apps that edit and add effects to your photos. But how many of them can combine photos into framed collages? Based on what I've seen, relatively few. But fortunately, of these few, there's one that stands out as the best.

Jaymar Cabebe Former Associate Editor
Jaymar Cabebe covers mobile apps and Windows software for CNET. While he may be a former host of the Android Atlas Weekly podcast, he doesn't hate iOS or Mac. Jaymar has worked in online media since 2007.
Jaymar Cabebe
3 min read

It may not be the most feature-packed app in the world, but Photo Grid is certainly the best I've seen at combining multiple photos into paneled, framed collages.

9.1

Photo Grid for Android

The Good

<b>Photo Grid</b> offers a huge menu of grid templates and a dead-simple interface for combining photos into framed collages.

The Bad

The app unfortunately doesn't let you customize the thickness of collage borders or the level of curvature on rounded panels.

The Bottom Line

Even though it's missing a couple of nifty customization tools, Photo Grid's simple interface and outstanding menu of pre-designed grids make it the best collage app on the market.

When you first use Photo Grid, you'll notice that its workflow makes the collage-making process a snap. First, choose one of the five different collage editors: Grid HD, Free HD, High, Wide, or Single. Next, shoot over to your Gallery and tap all of the images you want to work with (you can pick up to nine). And finally, within the editor, choose your orientation, rearrange your images, and apply all of your effects before saving. It's an intuitive process that you should be able to figure out as you go.

Photo Grid for Android dusts its competition

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Grid HD
The most popular of Photo Grid's collage editors is Grid HD, which comes with a huge menu of beautiful, pre-designed templates that accommodate anywhere from two to nine different photos. It offers different orientations (vertical, horizontal, or square) and lets you fiddle with settings like rounded corners and invisible borders. It even lets you add patterns, colors, and different die-cut edges to your borders. Overall, Photo Grid offers an adequate set of tools, but I still think it could use a couple of extras. It would be nice if Photo Grid let you customize the thickness of your borders and the curve of your collage's panels. I've seen these features on other collage apps, and have found them to be incredibly useful.

Free HD
If you're not so hot on the templates, the Free editor offers a free-form, tap-and-drag interface for creating collages. Admittedly, it's a lot more work to use Free than Grid, and your finished product may not look as polished, but it is certainly a worthwhile tool for those who enjoy coloring outside the lines. And unlike the other editors, the Free editor even lets you overlap images and add text boxes.

High and Wide
The High and Wide editors are simple and straightforward. You pick your images, and they create photobooth-style photo strips, either vertically or horizontally oriented. You can move and zoom in on your images, and that's about it.

Single
Probably the least used of the all the editors, this option puts out -- you guessed it -- one image, which doesn't exactly qualify as a collage. But while it may not let you combine photos, it does let you add different borders or even die-cut edges (think postage stamp) to your image, which can end up being pretty neat, depending how creative you get. That said, if you're looking to manipulate just a single photo, then you'd probably be better served using something other than Photo Grid.

No matter which collage editor you choose, Photo Grid offers a simple interface for moving and zooming in on photos and for swapping them between the frames of your collage. This is what stands out most to me about this app. While other collage apps are certainly capable of combining photos, they don't often come with such a simple tap-and-drag interface for performing these simple tasks. Also, Photo Grid is exceptionally good at sharing and saving its finished products, as it lets you choose between JPG and PNG formats, and high and very high resolutions.

9.1

Photo Grid for Android

Score Breakdown

Setup 10Features 8Interface 9Performance 10