Photo Collage Software for Mac OS X

I don’t often write about “simple” applications (i.e. one with quite specific purpose), but this is an interesting one. I was trying to assemble a bunch of photos together. The only tool I had on my Mac was Photoshop. Photoshop can definitely get the job done, but it was overkill. It was just too much work for a simple task. There has got to be some simple application that was built just to do these sort of things.

So, I got about Googling, and kept coming up with ShapeCollage. It’s $40 (or free, if you don’t mind a watermark on your collage. Now, if it had been just $1.99, I would have given it some consideration. But hey, iPhoto costs only $19.99, and ShapeCollage wanted $40?

Next, I got onto the Mac App Store and searched. Tada… TurboCollage. Not the prettiest name. It does seem like it will do what I need it to do. Then, more importantly, it’s free for today. So if not for any other reason, just go grab it just because it is free now. Checking Google result cache shows that TurboCollage could have cost $3.99, which is not at all unreasonable either.

TurboCollage does just what I need. Give it a bunch of photos, drag and place it wherever you want. There are a few basic layout options, not quite so ambitious as ShapeCollage, but it’s just the kind of layouts I’m looking for. Simple collages where the original photos are still largely viewable, not lost in complex creative layouts.

There are options to add shadows, rounded corners, and type of borders. You can also add text and style them with shadows and rotations. You can share your creation directly to Facebook, if you so wish to.

It’s a pretty useful app that fills a need for me: assemble and style a bunch of photos for posting on my blog.

It’s free for now, but even at $3.99, I think I’ll still recommend it.