The horizontal, vertical and grid layouts cover most everyday needs. Horizontal works well for a small number of photos that should read left to right, such as a before and after comparison or a short sequence of steps. Vertical suits tall content like stacked screenshots or a set of Instagram Story frames. Grid is the most flexible of the three, arranging any number of photos into even square cells with a column count you control.
Mismatched source sizes are handled automatically. Horizontal mode scales every photo to a shared height, vertical mode scales to a shared width, and grid mode fits each photo into its cell using fit, fill or stretch, the same three modes used throughout this site's resize tools. That shared height or width comes from the smallest photo in the group, not the largest, so scaling only ever goes down. Fill is usually the best default since it avoids empty space without distorting the photo.
When to use free-form mode instead
Free-form mode trades the tidy structure of the fixed layouts for full control. Every photo becomes an independent box that can be dragged anywhere on the canvas, resized from any corner, and rotated in 90 degree steps. The canvas itself is a fixed size based on the shape you pick — landscape, square or portrait — rather than being derived from your photos' resolution, so very high-resolution source photos are downscaled to fit. This suits scrapbook style layouts, moodboards, or any composition where photos should overlap or sit at different sizes rather than in a neat row or grid. The reset arrangement button snaps everything back into a simple grid if a layout gets too messy to work with.
Getting a clean double exposure blend
Overlay mode stacks every photo at the same size and position, using each layer's own opacity slider to control how much of the photos beneath show through. The canvas takes its size and aspect ratio from the first photo in the stack, and every other layer is cropped, not squished, to match that shape, so it helps to put your intended base photo first in the order. A common approach is to keep the base photo at full opacity and bring later layers down to somewhere between 30 and 60 percent, adjusting until the blended result reads clearly rather than as a muddy mix. Photos with strong silhouettes or high contrast against their background tend to blend most effectively.
