Travel photo collage templates

Sorting by favourites does not work, because your favourites are all the same photo. This does.

1. One wide. The view that made you stop walking. Only one, and it goes in the biggest cell.
2. One with a person in it. Anyone, including you. A trip collage with no people in it is a postcard rack, and this single photo is what turns it into a memory.
3. One detail. A door, a plate of food, a sign, a texture. Close, and preferably unremarkable.
4. One that was an accident. Blurry, tilted, taken from a moving train. It is the one that dates the trip and the one you will like in ten years.
5. Two more of anything, chosen to be different from the four above rather than good on their own.

Six chosen this way beat twelve chosen by quality, every time, because the mix of distances is what makes a collage read as a journey rather than as a gallery.

A landscape is wide because the width is the subject. Put it in a square cell and the crop removes exactly what made it: the horizon shortens, the sky is cut, the scale disappears.

So landscapes need wide cells or none at all. In practice:

• A layout with one full width band at the top and smaller cells underneath. The band takes the view, the cells take everything else.
• A row of three wide cells stacked, which suits three horizons: sea, mountain, city.
• Never a square grid of landscapes. Six squares of six views is the most common travel collage and the least interesting.

Portraits and details, by contrast, are happy in square cells, which is why a mixed set arranges so much better than a set of views.

Three different collages, and choosing which one you are making decides the layout before anything else.

The year grid is the one worth printing. Twelve travel photos on A3 is an object; the same twelve on a phone is a thumbnail sheet.

Travel photos come from wildly different light. A morning in the mountains is blue, a market at noon is neutral, a beach at six is orange. Put them in one grid and the collage looks like it was assembled from four different holidays.

Two ways out, and they pull in opposite directions.

Lean into it. Order the photos so the colour shifts gradually across the collage, cool to warm. It reads as a day passing and it looks deliberate.

Or neutralise it with a background that is present in all of them. Sand, stone, off-white. A strong background colour makes mismatched photos look chosen rather than collected.

What does not work is a white background with a mixed set: white makes every colour cast visible at once.

Pick a template above and it opens at the right size with the layout ready. Drop your photos in and press Auto if you are unsure: with travel photos it is unusually useful, because it matches each photo's shape to the cell that crops it least, which is exactly the problem a wide landscape creates.

Fifty more ideas, including what to do with tickets and maps, are in the travel collage guide. For a wall print, the print sizes matter more than the layout.