Creating a photo collage in Lightroom

Sometimes when I have a sequence of photos that belong together because they tell a story, or better capture a moment. Painters have the triptych – a painting divided into three panels. Photographers can do triptychs too, or they can do a diptych (2), or a quadriptych (4), or a polyptych (pick a number!).

All I wanted to do was to have a 4×4 grid-based photo layout with a white border and a small space between all the photos. Ideally I wanted a way to do this quickly and repeatably, without any manual layout apart from ordering the photos. This proved to be a little more painful that expected. Read on for how I did it…

My options were:

• Just do it in Photoshop/Pixelmator
• Use a web-based photo collage maker
• Make my own command-line based one with ImageMagick
• Move the photos to my phone and use an app like PicCollage
• Do it in the Lightroom Print module

The Lightroom Print module has a Print to JPEG File option and the option to creating different print layouts, so creating a 4×4 grid with borders of the desired width and outputting a square 1200x1200px JPEG should be easy…in theory.

There are existing templates for grids and triptychs and lots of other formats which might be suitable for some photographers but I wanted to create my own template.

First create a new custom page size. Press the Page Setup button, then select Paper Size > Manage Custom Sizes. Create a 1200 x 1200mm page size with 5mm non-printable areas at top/left/right/bottom.

Under Layout, select:

• Ruler Units: Millimeters
• Margins:

Under Print Job, select:

• TODO