How to make a collage in Lightroom Classic without drawing cells

By David · October 8, 2026 · 9 min read

You come back from a weekend away with ten photos you love. One of them deserves to be a print. The other nine deserve to be together - on one page for the wall, one spread in an album, or one post on Instagram. Lightroom Classic edited all ten beautifully. It has no idea how to put them on a page together.

So I built Collage Studio, a Lightroom Classic plugin that does the layout for you. And here is the confession: most of my own collages never see a print lab. They go to Instagram. So this post covers both - the lab and the feed - starting with the free method, because for some people it is genuinely enough.

Can you make a collage in Lightroom Classic without a plugin?

Yes. The Print module can do it, and every tutorial on the first page of Google teaches the same recipe:

1. Put the photos in a collection and select them.
2. Open the Print module and set the paper size in Page Setup.
3. In the Layout Style panel, choose Custom Package.
4. Add cells from the Cells panel (it offers six standard sizes), then drag each cell's handles or use the Adjust Selected Cell sliders to size it.
5. Drag photos from the Filmstrip into the cells, one by one.
6. Set borders, a page background and any text in the Image Settings and Page panels.
7. In the Print Job panel, set Print to: JPEG File, pick a resolution (240 ppi is the default) and click Print to File.
8. Click Create Saved Print if you ever want to change it again.

It works, it is free, and if you make one collage a year, stop here. Adobe documents the panels in its Print module layouts help page.

One thing people expect and don't get: the Print module's Auto Layout button only works in Picture Package, the mode for printing the same photo several times on a sheet. In Custom Package, every cell is yours to draw.

Where the Print module route falls apart

The first page is fine. The trouble starts when the job is bigger than one page, or when the photos have people in them.

• Every page is drawn by hand. A 30-spread wedding album is 30 rounds of drawing cells and dropping photos. There is no "fill these pages with my selection in order."
• Crops ignore faces. A portrait dropped into a wide cell gets cropped wherever the cell lands. You catch the missing foreheads yourself and nudge each photo back.
• You only see one arrangement. Want to compare a grid with a looser layout? Draw both.
• The result leaves your catalog. Print to File writes a JPEG to disk. It does not appear next to the shoot unless you import it.
• Changing it later is another round trip. Swap one photo next month and you reopen the saved print (if you made one), then export again.

The other common route is worse for Lightroom users: export the selects, upload them to a template app, arrange them there and export again. Change an edit in Lightroom and you make the whole trip twice.

What Collage Studio does differently

Collage Studio starts from the photos you already picked. Select them in the Library - one page's worth or a whole album, up to 200 - and choose Library > Plug-in Extras > Collage Studio. The designer opens in your browser, running on your own Mac, with every page already laid out in your Lightroom order.

A wall of layouts that already hold your photos

Next to the page sits a wall of other layouts, grouped by kind: No crop (every photo whole), Grid, Two pages for album spreads, and Scattered, which tosses the photos like prints on a table. They are filled with your own photos, not grey boxes, so you choose by looking. Click one and the page is done. If you want to fiddle, you can drag a photo inside its frame, drag the lines between photos, or hold Option and drop one photo on another to swap them.

Nobody's face gets cut

This is the first thing it checks. Before it crops anything, Collage Studio finds the faces and people in every photo, on your Mac, and frames each crop around them. The grid and spread layouts in the wall show their crop percentage, and the ones marked "whole photos" crop nothing at all. For album spreads, each side of the spread gets its own layout, so no face lands on the fold.

The finished pages come back into Lightroom

Click Save to Lightroom and every page is rendered from your edited full-resolution files - Lightroom does the rendering, so the collage looks like your edits, not the raw file. The pages land in a Collage Studio collection, saved either in their own folder or right next to the photos they came from, sorted in after them. A ten-page album takes about a minute to save.

Next month, select a saved collage and choose Edit Collage. The designer reopens exactly where you left it: add a photo, swap one, rearrange a page, save again. Your originals, edits, ratings and keywords are never touched; Collage Studio only writes new files.

Collages for Instagram, not just the print lab

Most collage tutorials assume paper. Most of my collages end up on a phone screen instead. The Screen sizes cover the places photos actually get shared:

The carousel setup is the one worth knowing. Choose the 4:5 size, set three or four photos per page, and the project becomes a set of slides that already belong together. If you are deciding which slide goes first, my post on ordering photos in an Instagram carousel covers that, and posting from Lightroom Classic to Instagram covers getting them onto your phone.

A title and a second line come in four typefaces (Serif, Sans, Script, Typewriter), and your logo can sit in a corner or centred at the bottom. What you see on screen is what ends up in the file.

Settings that matter when you do print

For the lab, the defaults are sensible and the rest is labelled plainly:

• Print sizes run from 4 x 6 to 24 x 36 in, metric from 10 x 15 cm to A1, and album pages and two-page spreads from 8 x 8 to 12 x 12 in (plus 20 and 30 cm). Custom sizes take inches, centimetres or pixels.
• Resolution is 300 ppi by default. Bleed adds 0.125 in on each side for labs that trim, and the Guides toggle shows the trim line and the fold.
• Files save as JPEG or TIFF, in sRGB, Adobe RGB or Display P3, with Lightroom's own output sharpening for screen, matte or glossy paper.
• Before you save, it warns you about any photo that would print below 200 ppi at that size.

That last warning catches the most common cause of a soft print: a disconnected drive. If the originals are offline, Lightroom only has Smart Previews to render from, and a 16 x 20 print from a Smart Preview comes out soft. Connect the drive before you save anything big.

Print module vs Collage Studio at a glance

Who should stay with the Print module

If you print one collage a year and it has no faces near the edges, the Print module is free and it is enough. I would rather you knew that than bought something you open once.

Collage Studio also has real limits today. It needs a Mac with Apple Silicon (M1 or later) on macOS 14 Sonoma or newer, and Lightroom Classic - not the cloud-based Lightroom app. Intel Macs and Windows are not supported yet; if you need either, tell me, because demand decides what gets built next. Each photo sits on one page of a project, so if you want the same frame twice, make a virtual copy first.

Where it earns its keep: albums, client sneak peeks the same evening, a year of family photos on one wall print, and anything with people in it that you want posted or printed this week rather than "when I have an afternoon."

Frequently asked questions about Lightroom Classic collages

Does Lightroom Classic have a collage feature?

Not a dedicated one. The Print module's Custom Package layout is the built-in way: you draw the cells on a page, drag photos into them and print or save the page as a JPEG. The Book module has auto layout, but it designs pages for books rather than single prints or social posts.

Can I make an Instagram collage in Lightroom Classic?

With the Print module, yes, if you set custom file dimensions for the JPEG and lay out the cells to match. Collage Studio has Instagram portrait 4:5, square and Story / Reel 9:16 sizes built in, and with three or four photos per page each page becomes one carousel slide.

Does Collage Studio change my photos or edits?

No. It reads your edited photos and writes new files - the collages. Your originals, edits, ratings and keywords stay exactly as they were.

Do my photos get uploaded anywhere?

No. The layouts, the face finding and the rendering all run on your Mac. There is no account, and it works with the internet off.

Can I change a collage after I save it?

Yes. Select the saved collage in Lightroom and choose Edit Collage. Add or swap photos, rearrange a page or change the title, then save; the new version replaces the old one in the collection and the earlier file stays on disk.