NEW YORK: An online mobile photo-sharing, video-sharing and social networking service, Instagram is rolling out Layout, a free, standalone app that merges multiple images into one. It’s available on iOS now (on the App Store), and an Android version is expected in the next few months.
Users pick up to nine photos from their phone’s Camera Roll — whether they were snapped via Instagram doesn’t matter. The app organizes them in three sections: recent photos snapped, photos with people’s faces in them, and an area with all your shots. There’s also a “Photo Booth” feature, which employs the smartphone’s front-facing camera to snap four shots in quick succession.
Layout suggests up to 10 collage templates to choose from, depending on the number of selected photos, and lets folks tweak their work any number of ways, like dragging and dropping photos in the collage, pinch-to-zoom, and a sci-fi-like “mirror” effect that duplicates part of a shot. Afterwards, they can share their creations from inside the app to platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Flipboard, Slack and others. (Twitter integration is noticeably absent.)
