Shape Collage

Introduction
About Shape Collage
Download and Installation
Working with Shape Collage
Pricing and Support
Conclusion

Introduction

If you love to create collages of all sorts from your pictures, then you know that positioning and moving individual pictures for a collage can be a time-consuming process that requires many hours of experimentation. Naturally, all those extra hours mean that there is a limit to your creativity since you would not want to start all over again with a collage product. Shape Collage, our review product frees you from these time concerns and lets you focus entirely on your creativity. Well, that's not entirely true since it also bundles oodles of creativity. Even better, the program is freeware and can create layered Photoshop files for your collage! When we saw this for the first time, it did look too good to sound true.

About Shape Collage

Shape Collage is from Vincent Cheung, a Computer Engineering PhD student at the University of Toronto. His other initiatives are FaceDown, a product that lets you quickly download Facebook pictures, and JavaScript Encryption and Decryption, an online form-based script. You can learn more about these products and download the free copy of Shape Collage from Vincent Cheung's site.

Shape Collage is a free automatic photo collage maker that allows you to create collages in different shapes. Shape Collage creates collages using an intelligent machine learning algorithm that automatically places the photos in the collage so that they form the desired shape, be it a rectangle, heart, circle, snowman, text, or logo. Created collages can be saved as JPEGs, PNGs, and Adobe Photoshop PSD files. The PSD files are entirely layered and can be edited afterwards using Photoshop's native tools. Shape Collage is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. For this review, we worked with the Windows version.

Our contact for this review was Vincent Cheung. Thank you, Vincent.

Download and Installation

Download the installer, run the setup routine, and follow the instructions. You'll end up with a Shape Collage program group in your Windows Start menu, as shown in Figure 1, below.

Figure 1: Shape Collage Start menu Group

Working with Shape Collage

Here are the few quick steps to get started with creating Shape Collage:

1. Go to your Windows Start menu, and choose All Programs | Shape Collage | Shape Collage, as shown in Figure 1, above.
2. Doing so opens the Shape Collage interface, as shown in Figure 2, below.
3. 
   Figure 2: Shape Collage Interface
4. The interface is explained below:

A. Photos

5. You can drag and drop the pictures here or click the plus (+) button which opens the Add Pictures dialog box. You can now navigate to the folder where the pictures are saved on your hard disk. If you want to remove one picture, select that picture and click the minus (-) button, or click the Clear List button to remove all the pictures.

B. Status

6. This pane shows a preview of the collage. Once the pictures are added, click the Preview button to see a preview of the collage. Click Create, which opens the Save Collage As dialog box. Here you can provide a name to the collage file, choose the file type from JPEG, PNG and PSD, and navigate to the folder where you want the collage to be saved.
7. The Watch layout animation option enables/disables the layout animation.

C. Parameters

8. This pane has three tabs which are explained below:

i. Shape and Size

9. Here you can choose the shape from rectangle, heart, circle, text shape, and your own shape. Under size you can format the collage size, photo size, set number of photos you want to add in the collage, and their photo spacing.

ii. Appearance

10. Here you can choose background attributes from background color, transparent background, and picture background. You can also choose the color of a photo border and set its size (thickness) too.

iii. Advanced

11. Within this tab, you can set the boundaries of the shape to be jagged (natural), and set all the pictures to be the same size.
3. Add pictures and choose a shape. Then, click Preview to see how it looks. Click Create to save your file. Figure 3, below, shows a picture collage created within a heart shape.
4. 
   Figure 3: Heart shape picture collage

Here are some sample collages created in Shape Collage.

Pricing and Support

Shape Collage is freeware.

Support option includes e-mail support and an online FAQ.

Conclusion

Shape Collage is among the most awesome products we have worked with, it is a one-trick pony, and it performs flawlessly.