Make a photo collage from your own photos

Applies to: Photo Date Rescue for Windows, version 3.0.4. Last verified: 29 July 2026. Every statement on this page was checked against the shipping 3.0.4 build. If you are on an older or newer version, the behavior may differ — check What’s new for changes.

This page is the reference we cite from our comparison table. Each capability below has its own permanent link, so a claim about PDR can always be traced to the paragraph that supports it. Where the answer is “no” or “only partly”, this page says so in the same words the comparison uses.

The one thing to understand first

A collage in PDR is a document, not a one-shot picture. Most of the free collage tools people have used treat a collage as something you arrange once and download; if you want it different, you start again. PDR keeps two separate things, and knowing which is which explains almost everything else on this page:

• The project — the editable design. Layout, crops, text, effects and the list of photos it points at. It saves itself as you work and you reopen it later to keep editing.
• The export — the flat picture you print, post or send. Baking one does not consume the project; you can bake another after you change your mind.

A carousel is the same editor in a different shape: one wide canvas across several pages, exported as a set of same-size slides plus the joined wide image. It is a separate kind of project, and on the free trial it has its own separate cap.

The free trial caps creation, not capability. Five collages and five carousels, counted for the lifetime of the trial and counted separately, so five of each rather than five between them. Nothing about the editor is reduced inside those five — no watermark, no locked panels, no reduced export size.

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At a glance

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Exporting: size, format and where it goes

The export presets are built around what the picture is for, and the print ones are computed at 300 DPI rather than screen resolution. Photo sizes run from 4×6 up to 20×30 inches, and paper sizes offer A5, A4, A3 and A2 directly with A1 and A0 behind “More”. A separate set of social presets covers Instagram square, portrait, story and multi-page carousel, plus Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, X, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Snapchat.

The export is capped at 8000 pixels tall, so the largest presets do not deliver the size they ask for. A 20×30 comes out 6000×8000 rather than 6000×9000, A1 comes out 7020×8000 and A0 comes out 9930×8000 rather than 9930×14040. Nothing on screen tells you the cap has been applied. These are measured output files, not preset arithmetic.

So: every preset up to and including 16×20 inches and A2 exports at its full stated size — A2 is the tallest that fits, at 7020 pixels. The three tallest presets do not. If you are ordering a genuine 20×30 or A0 print, take the shortfall into account before you send the file, or design at 16×20 or A2 and have the printer scale it.

The export is a flat image — JPEG at quality 92, or PNG when you have asked for a transparent background. There is no PDF export and no layered file; the editable version of the design is the project, not the exported picture.

It lands inside your library rather than in Downloads: PDR Captures, in a folder for the month, named with the standard PDR timestamp and a _CO suffix. It is then indexed like any other photo and filed into a “PDR Collages” album for its category, so it is searchable and datable the moment it exists. There is no “save as” folder picker — if you want the file somewhere else, you take it from there afterwards. Re-saving a design you have already exported replaces the previous export rather than accumulating near-copies.

The caveat, and it is a real one. Normally the export captures the canvas exactly as you see it, at whatever size you chose — what you designed is what comes out. If that capture fails, PDR does not stop and does not tell you: it falls back to redrawing the layout from its saved description, and that fallback path is clamped to a maximum of 2400 pixels on each side. The failure is written to the log and nowhere else. So a 6000-pixel-wide print export can, in the failure case, quietly produce a 2400-pixel image with some of the finer editor effects redrawn rather than captured. We have not seen it happen in normal use, and it is still wrong that it happens silently. It is listed in known gaps.

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Composing the layout

The canvas is free-form, not a fixed grid. Photos can be dragged anywhere, resized, cropped in place, overlapped and rotated, and the page shows alignment guides with distance badges as you move things, so lining two photos up is a matter of dragging until the guide snaps rather than nudging by eye. There is an Arrange panel with roughly ten starting layouts and a Shuffle, for when you would rather begin from something than from nothing, and an Align to page menu for the usual center and edge alignments.

Overlapping photos have a full stacking order: bring to front, bring forward, send backward and send to back, with keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl+Shift+] and friends) and a toolbar control on the selected photo. A photo can be locked in position so you stop dragging it by accident, and its layer can be locked separately so that moving a background photo does not yank it to the front. Around the photos there are page outlines, dividers, a frame, and a corner-rounding slider.

What is missing is a spacing control. There is no gutter or margin slider that sets an even gap between every photo at once — the free canvas that lets you put things anywhere is also the canvas that makes you place them evenly by hand, with the guides as your help. Tools built around a fixed grid usually have one slider for this, and here you do not. Undo and redo (Ctrl+Z, Ctrl+Y) cover the experimenting.

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Editing a photo inside the collage

You do not have to leave the collage to fix a photo in it. Selecting one gives you Tone & color (brightness, contrast and saturation sliders), Flip & rotate (mirror, flip, rotate 90° and a fine angle nudge), a background remover that cuts the subject out with an adjustable strength and can be undone back to the original, and the decorative layers — text with its own line spacing, emojis, looks, effects, glow and shadow, vignette and grain.

The one that matters most in practice is Replace photo. Pick a different picture and it drops into the same position, at the same size, keeping the frame — so deciding halfway through that the third photo is the wrong one costs you a click rather than the layout. Empty frames offer Add photo instead. Photos can be duplicated (Ctrl+D), cut, copied and pasted within the canvas.

None of this touches the original file. The collage holds a reference and its own adjustments; the photo in your library is unchanged.

Two editor defects are present in 3.0.4 and are fixed on a branch that did not make this release. Pressing F2 on a selected text box does not enter edit mode — you have to double-click it. And the Page Outline color picker offers only six hand-maintained swatches instead of the full collage palette that the text controls use, so the color you chose for your text may not be offerable for the outline. Both are cosmetic rather than destructive, and both are real.

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Coming back to it tomorrow

This is the part that most free collage makers do not do at all, so it is worth being precise about. The design saves itself while you work — there is no Save button to forget. A chip beside the title says Saving… the moment a change is pending and All changes saved once it has landed, so you are not guessing. Reopening a project restores the whole design, including which photos it used, and a carousel reopens as a carousel with its page count intact.

The project file is stored twice, on purpose: a working copy in the application’s own data folder, so your collages still open with the library drive unplugged, and a written-through copy on the library drive itself under .pdr\collages, so they survive a reinstall or a new machine and travel with the photos. When a drive is reconnected the two lists are merged with the newer copy winning.

On top of that: a design can be saved as a template to start future collages from, and it stays pristine when you open it — you get a new collage, not an edit of the template. Designs are named as a category and a name, which is how they group in the gallery. And deleting a project or a template sends it to a recycle bin you can restore from, with the deletion syncing to the library copy so nothing resurrects itself later.

What reopening does not give you is an earlier version of the design. That is a separate question, and the next section answers it.

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Going back to an earlier version of a design

No — there is one saved state, and saving replaces it. The autosave that means you never lose work is the same thing that means you cannot retrieve earlier work: it writes over the same project record every time, so nothing keeps the design as it stood before your last change. There is no version list, no revision history and nothing to restore. Undo covers the session you are in, up to sixty steps, and is cleared when you reopen a project. The Save as new collage item on the chevron beside Save appears once you have saved to your library and keeps a second exported photo alongside the first — it does not fork the project. The only snapshot you can actually take is Save as template, which writes a separate frozen record you can open later as a fresh collage.

To do it

1. Before a change you may want to undo later, choose Save as template and give it a name you will recognize.
2. Keep working on the collage. The template is its own record and is not touched by anything you do next.
3. To return to the earlier design, open that template from the welcome screen. It opens as a new collage and the template stays as it was.

Limitations

• The two stored copies are not two versions. The working copy and the library-drive copy described above are mirrors of the same record, kept in step with the newer one winning. They protect you against a lost drive or a reinstall, not against an edit you regret.
• Update overwrites the exported photo too. Re-saving a collage deletes the previous exported image from your library rather than keeping both, so the superseded picture is not recoverable from the recycle bin. Use “Save as new collage” when you want to keep the earlier one.
• The recycle bin restores the project, not a past state. A deleted collage comes back exactly as it was last saved.
• Templates are the whole of it. They are designs to start from, not a numbered history: nothing lists them against the collage they came from, and you only have one if you thought to make it. Designs opened from the same template also converge onto a single project card on purpose, so opening a template again continues that one design rather than adding another.

This works the same way for a carousel, where the consequences are larger because a re-save replaces a whole album of slides. There is a fuller account, with the carousel specifics, under keeping earlier versions of a post.

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Getting your own photos into it

The collage editor sits inside the same application that holds your photos, so the source of a collage is your library: you select the photos you want and open them in the editor. There is no upload, no import step, no separate copy of your collection to keep in sync, and no file-size or file-count ceiling on what you can pull in beyond what your own disk holds.

That matters more than it sounds. The work of making a collage from a real photo collection is mostly finding the photos — the right six from the right weekend, four years ago. Those are already dated, grouped and searchable here, which is the point of the rest of the product. Organize and Discover cover that side.

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Where the photos and the design actually go

Nowhere. The editor is part of the desktop application and runs on your machine; the background remover explicitly runs on your device rather than calling a service; the project files and the exported image are written to your own disk. There is no account to create, no sign-in, no upload, and no copy of your family on somebody else’s server waiting to be part of a breach or a change of terms.

The practical consequence is that a collage made here is not shareable by link, because there is no server to host it. Getting it to somebody is a separate job — see Share, which is candid about how limited that is.

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Platform and accessibility

Windows only. There is no macOS build, no Linux build, no web version and no mobile app, so a collage cannot be started on a phone or finished on an iPad. If you are not on Windows, none of the rest of this page is available to you, and the comparison table scores that against us.

On assistive technology we record unknown, and we mean it rather than using it as a polite no. What we can say from the construction is that the editor is a direct-manipulation canvas: photos are positioned by dragging, resized by handles and cropped by handles, and the destructive and structural operations do have keyboard shortcuts — undo, redo, duplicate, delete, copy, paste and the whole stacking order. What we cannot say is whether someone working by keyboard and screen reader can complete a collage, because a canvas of this kind is exactly where that question is hardest and we have not run the test. Until we have, we are not scoring ourselves a pass on it.

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Building from your library, and finding the collage back in it

Yes. A collage is built from the photographs already in your library — there is no importing, no uploading and no hunting through folders for the six pictures you want. When you save, the finished picture goes back the other way: it is filed into the library as a real photo in its own album, so it is browsable, searchable and datable alongside everything else rather than sitting in a downloads folder on its own. The editable project is kept separately from that finished picture, so you can reopen it and change your mind later without the two getting confused. See getting your own photos into it for the way in, and exporting for exactly where the picture lands.

To do it

1. Select the photographs you want in your library and open them in the collage editor.
2. Design the collage. It saves itself as you work — the chip beside the title reads Saving… and then All changes saved.
3. Save the finished picture. It is written into your library, indexed like any other photo, and filed into its album.
4. From the project you can jump straight to the finished picture where it now sits in the library.

Limitations

• The link runs one way. From the project you can jump to the finished picture in the library, but the picture in the library does not tell you which project made it. To change a collage you go back to the collage list and reopen the project there.
• The album is created by a setting that is on by default. Turn it off and the collage still saves into your library perfectly well — it is simply not filed into that album, so you will find it by date rather than by album.

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Giving it a designed look rather than a plain grid

Yes. The background is not limited to a flat color: it can be a plain color, a blend of colors, a texture or one of your own photographs, and it can carry its own blur or glow. Individual photos take glow, shadow and depth, lift, vignette, grain and blend modes, so a picture can be made to sit in the design rather than on top of it. The dividers between photos can be colored, thickened and given an effect at a strength you choose. Taken together it is a design surface rather than a template filler, which is the practical difference between a collage that looks made and one that looks generated.

To do it

1. Set the background first — color, blend, texture or a photograph — and add its blur or glow if you want the photos to sit forward of it.
2. Place your photos, then select one and work through the effects on it: glow and shadow for depth, vignette and grain for age, a blend mode for how it meets the background.
3. Style the dividers and the Page Outline to finish the edges.
4. Use Ctrl+Z freely. Effects are the part of the editor most worth experimenting with.

Limitations

• The stacking order between kinds of element is fixed. The background is drawn first, then the photos, then the text. Photos can be layered freely among themselves, but a photo cannot be placed behind an element that sits above it in that order.
• The supplied textures are the ones that ship. You cannot add your own to that set. If you want a texture we do not supply, use it as a background photograph instead.
• On a very large canvas with many layered effects, the drawing on screen can differ slightly from the finished file. See whether the exported file matches what you edited, which sets out where that happens and how far it goes.

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Putting words on the collage, and styling them

Yes, down to individual words. Add a text box and you get thirty-three typefaces grouped by mood, a weight menu running from Thin to Black, bold, italic, underline and strikethrough, a size dial, transparency, line spacing, alignment, and a symbol picker for arrows and marks that are not on the keyboard. Four effects are available — outline, shadow, neon and 3D — each with its own strength and its own color, set separately from the color of the letters. The box rotates freely by a handle and can be dragged wider or narrower to change where the words wrap.

The part people do not expect is that all of this works inside a single box. Highlight two words and recolour just those. Pick a new color and keep typing, and only what you type next changes. The same is true of the typeface, the size, the weight, the effect and every style button, so one heading can carry three colors and two faces without being three separate boxes stacked on top of each other. There is also a format painter: highlight some words whose look you want, then apply that look elsewhere.

To do it

1. Press Add text and type. Drag the box where you want it, and use its rotate handle if it should sit at an angle.
2. Set the look of the whole box from the text panel — Font, Size, Style, Alignment, Line spacing, Transparency.
3. To style part of it, select those words first, then change the setting. To style what you are about to type, change the setting with nothing selected and carry on typing.
4. For an effect, choose one under Effect, set Strength, and use the Text / Effect toggle on the color palette to say which of the two the color you pick applies to.

Limitations

• Text follows a straight line. There is no curved text, no text on a path and no arc, so a badge or a circular caption has to be built as a picture elsewhere and brought in.
• Letters take one color at a time. You can give different words different colors, but a single letter cannot fade from one color to another — there is no gradient fill.
• Changing the canvas size rescales the words rather than re-wrapping them. Going from a square to a story shape keeps your line breaks where they were, so long headings usually want a look over afterwards. See changing the canvas to another size.

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Whether the finished file matches what you were editing

Yes, with edge cases — and we would rather name them than promise a perfect match. The finished file is produced by the same drawing engine that draws the editor, rather than by a second one written specially for saving. That removes the usual cause of a collage looking different once it is saved, which is two renderers disagreeing about the same design. The typefaces ship with PDR rather than being fetched when you need them, so type renders identically on any machine, including one that has never been online. What follows is the honest list of where a difference can still appear.

To do it

1. Finish the design and check it at the zoom you care about.
2. Choose the size you want and save. What is on the canvas is what is captured.
3. Open the finished picture from your library at full size and compare it against the editor before you send it to a printer.

Limitations

• On very large canvases, fine anti-aliasing and type at extreme sizes can differ slightly. Edges that are smoothed one way on screen can be smoothed fractionally differently in the finished file. At print sizes this is invisible at arm’s length; at pixel level it is there.
• Deeply layered effects are where a difference is most likely. Several blend modes with glow and shadow over a textured background is the hardest case, and a small difference in opacity or blur is the form it takes.
• A cut-out edge is only as good as the cut-out. If the subject was separated from its background imperfectly in the editor, the finished file reproduces that imperfection faithfully rather than tidying it.
• There are no export quality settings. The file is produced at fixed settings you cannot tune, so there is no way to trade file size against fidelity either way.
• Above 8000 pixels tall, the file is not the size you asked for. The three tallest presets — 20×30 Print, A1 and A0 — are capped at 8000 pixels of height, silently. The design still fills the file, but the file is shorter than the preset promises. See exporting.
• There is one failure case that is not subtle. If the capture of the canvas fails outright, PDR falls back to redrawing the design at a much smaller maximum size and does not tell you on screen. See exporting, and known gaps.

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Changing the canvas to another size

Only partly, and the shortfall is worth stating plainly: it rescales, it does not reflow. The canvas can be changed to another size or shape, with the common presets a click away, and everything already on it is repositioned and rescaled to suit the new proportions. A simple layout — a few photos with a line of text — survives a change of shape without being rebuilt, which is genuinely useful. What does not happen is any intelligent reorganisation. Nothing decides that a three-across arrangement should become two-across on a narrower page, because nothing is reasoning about your layout at all.

To do it

1. Open the canvas size controls and pick a preset, or type a custom width and height.
2. Confirm the change. Everything on the canvas is repositioned and rescaled at once.
3. Look over the whole design afterwards — particularly text, and anything that was near an edge.
4. If it is wrong, undo with Ctrl+Z rather than resizing back to where you started.

Limitations

• Text is scaled, not re-wrapped. Lines are not re-broken to suit the new width, so a headline that read well across a wide page can read badly down a narrow one.
• Photos set to exact sizes can end up cropped rather than resized. A picture pinned to a specific size does not simply shrink to fit the new proportions.
• Overlapping elements can end up covering each other, or pushed off the edge. A layout that depended on precise placement is the one most likely to come out wrong.
• Custom sizes are typed in and are not sanity-checked. An extreme or mistyped figure is accepted as entered.
• Resizing back is not the way to reverse it. Returning to the old dimensions runs a second rescale on an already-rescaled layout. Undo instead.

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Known gaps in 3.0.4

Collected in one place, so you do not have to read the whole page to find them.

• The export is capped at 8000 pixels tall with no warning, so 20×30 Print, A1 and A0 come out shorter than the preset says.
• If the canvas capture fails, the export falls back to a redraw clamped to 2400 pixels and says so only in the log — a print-size export can quietly come out small.
• No spacing or gutter control: even gaps between photos are placed by hand.
• F2 does not enter edit mode on a selected text box; double-click does.
• The Page Outline color picker offers six swatches rather than the full palette the text controls use.
• No PDF export and no layered file — the export is a flat JPEG or PNG.
• No version history: saving replaces the one saved state, and a template saved by hand is the only way to keep an earlier design.
• No “save as” folder picker; the export is filed into your library and you move it from there.
• Windows only — no macOS, Linux, web or mobile version.
• Keyboard-only and screen-reader operation of the editor are untested.
• On the free trial, five collages and five carousels for the lifetime of the trial.

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How to check any of this yourself

• The print size is real, and where it stops being real: export a collage at 16×20 inches and look at the file’s pixel dimensions in Windows Explorer — 4800×6000, the full 300 DPI size. Now export the same design at 20×30. It is 6000×8000, not 6000×9000, because of the height cap. (Until 30 July 2026 this page told you to check for 6000×9000. That was our arithmetic, not a measurement, and it was wrong.)
• That it is genuinely reopenable: build a collage, close the editor without exporting anything, quit PDR entirely, reopen it, and open the project from the collages home screen. The design is there, including your crops and text.
• That it saves itself: move a photo and watch the chip beside the title. It says Saving…, then All changes saved.
• That the project survives the drive: look on your library drive for a .pdr\collages folder. Your designs are in it.
• Replace in place: right-click a photo in the canvas and choose Replace photo. The new one arrives in the same box at the same size.
• The layering: overlap two photos, select the lower one and press Ctrl+Shift+]. It comes to the front.
• The missing spacing control: look through every panel for a gap, spacing, gutter or margin slider that applies to the photos. The only spacing slider in the editor is line spacing, and that is for text.
• That nothing is uploaded: disconnect from the internet completely and make a collage, background removal included. It all works.

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If something on this page does not match what your copy of PDR does, that is a defect in one of the two and we want to know which. Tell us on the support page.

Related: the step-by-step guide to collages and carousels walks through making one rather than describing what is possible. Organize and Discover cover finding the photos to put in it, and Share covers getting the finished picture to somebody.