15 minutes to a prettier blog: photo collages

Im all about series. You may notice I tend to start many of them here on my little ol’ blog.

Anyhoos, this one has been in the making for quite a while. There are so many quick and easy ways to beautify, simplify, whatever-else-ify your blog and I’m super excited to start sharing some quick and easy tips with you!

Today I’m starting off with a fun one. Photo collages. Using photos on blogs is more important than ever, thanks to Pinterest. Its a wonderful way to promote your blog and grow your traffic, and you can read more here to find out how if you missed it earlier. So by all means, use great photos and illustrations  (legally, of course…I don’t even have to say that, right??).

One fun way to add a little pizzaz to your images is to create a photo collage. Its a great way to get a lot of imagery in one small space. Now, there are eleventy billion ways to make a photo collage and plenty of services out there to help you. But one word (or three…) of caution.

Less. Is. More.

You dont need purple butterflies or airbrush fonts adorning your photos. Let them speak for themselves. Trust me, they will.

I have researched many techniques and my pick is Picasa. Why Picasa? Well, its free and easy. Plus its a Google product so that right there tells you its awesome.

So here we go (if you have a hard time seeing the screenshots, just click on the image to open a larger view)…

1.

Launch Picasa (if you dont have it, get it here).

2.

Create a new album and name it accordingly (i.e. “Birthday Party Post Collage”)

3.

Import the images you want to use in your collage. This can be done several ways. If you already have an image library, like iPhoto, it should be listed in the left hand column. Open the appropriate folder and select the images (holding down the Cntr/Cmd key) you want to import into your newly created album.

4.

Simply drag and drop them into your new album.

5.

This is important. Select all the images in your album (otherwise they wont be included when you try to create the collage). You’ll know they are selected if they all have a blue outline around them.

6.

Now the fun part…right under the album title, click on the second icon from the left, “Create Photo Collage”.

7.

Picasa will automatically create a layout, but you can change settings…

In the first dropdown, select Picture Pile…

Mosaic…

Frame Mosaic…

Grid…

and so on. (For the rest of this tutorial I’m going to use Mosaic.)

8.

You can add spacing between photos using the “Grid Spacing” slider.

9.

To change the photo arrangement, click “Shuffle Pictures” below the collage preview, or drag and drop each photo until you are pleased with the design.

10.

When you’re done editing, click “Create Collage”. Picasa will process the image and when its finished, you can continue to edit it as a whole (ie. crop, red-eye, etc.)

11.

Now, click File>Export Picture to Folder. This is how you’re going to resize the image to fit in your blog.

Most likely, your posting area isnt more than about 600px wide, so select the 640px option and you can resize it from there if necessary. The export function is going to save your image inside a folder named whatever you enter into the first field. Click Export.

12.

Now just upload it to your post and you’re done!

Easy huh? Ok, who’s got questions?