Picture Collage Maker 3.1

Picture Collage Maker is a comprehensive application that allows you to create beautiful collages out of your personal photos or any type of images stored in your computer. It is a full-featured utility that offers the proper means to design professional-looking creations that may take the form of photo albums, calendars, disk covers, scrapbooks, greeting cards, magazine covers, and so on.

The interface is intuitive and well-organized, and makes the editing process easy to carry out. If for some reason you encounter problems in dealing with the program, the tool's Help menu will definitely clarify any misunderstanding, since it has been thoroughly designed. The only drawback is that you will need an Internet connection. The utility comes with a large palette of templates. They are conveniently classified into clearly-defined categories, which I already mentioned in the introduction paragraph. The templates will help you create family calendars, photo bulk albums with your dear ones, disk covers, and posters with whatever pictures you like. However, the list is extensive, so it is unlikely that you don’t find a pattern that suits your needs.

Once a template is selected, the program allows you to adjust it as you wish. The possibilities are endless. They depend entirely on your creativity. You have the ability to change the background with a different image or color. Furthermore, you can modify an existing text comment or add a new one. The text is highly customizable in terms of fonts, alignment, opacity, and position on the image area. Text effects – like stroke, glow, and background – are also provided. The same happens when you want to edit an overlaid picture. You are able to resize it, change the inclination angle, round the corners, add frames or masks, and apply a series of effects, like black-and-white, antique, blur etc. The app comes with a consistent set of comic and cartoon-like images, which, once imported, will give a funny appearance to your creation.

If you ran out of creative ideas and you wish to continue editing the project later, the program saves your collage as a personal template, which you can resume the moment you feel more inspired. Once it is finished, you can save your creation in popular image formats or as a PDF document. In addition, you are able to share it on social networks, send it via e-mail, or set it as a desktop wallpaper.

The program is stable and functions well. I admit that I didn't encounter any error whatsoever. With other similar programs I experienced blocking moments when loading pictures or when applying different editing issues fast, but it wasn't the case with Picture Collage Maker. The only thing I didn't like about this utility is that it doesn't provide the undo and redo buttons on the main window. Each time you want to enable one of these commands, you need to go to the upper toolbar. This may cause a slight discomfort, as it slows down the editing process. An alternative solution would be the use of shortcut keys, but not all users – I refer mainly to inexperienced ones – know the combination of keys or have the habit to use them. Overall, the utility is good and worth to be used - the difference between an exquisite collage and kitsch is given by the users' creativity and artistic skills.