Picture Collage Maker Editor's Review

Create cool collages and digital scrapbooks with this cool Mac tool.

Over the past couple of years or so I've gained not only a son-in-law, but a granddaughter as well. As each major life event has occurred, I've been there...with my DSLR... to capture the moments. This creates a great deal of volume in your photo library. The biggest problem that I have is that I never really get to do much with the photos after retouching and posting to a social network site, that's about it. Which is why I really like Picture Collage Maker when it comes to making something a bit special with the special images I have.

Picture Collage Maker is a fun and easy desktop app that helps you create photo collages and scrapbooks from your digital photos to share with friends and family. With just a few clicks, you can create posters, invitations, calendars, and greeting cards plus a number of other cool pieces of collateral. Whether you're into digital photography, scrapbooking or some other cool hobby that involves pictures, Picture Collage Maker can help you transform your priceless pictures into precious memories.

The app has over 140 professional templates. If that isn't enough for you, you can download another 130+ extra templates in the Store for free. PCM's templates cover all categories of greeting cards, scrapbooks, photo albums, calendars, disk covers, comic collages, posters and magazine covers, etc. The app incorporates themes for various occasions and holidays – Travelling, Birthday, Wedding, Family Tree, Yearbook, Anniversary, Christmas, etc. It also has over 180 different backgrounds, over 730 pieces of clipart, and more than 140 frames, and 80 different masks.

• Export and Share Your Photo Collage Anywhere
• Save collage as image formats – JPG, TIFF, BMP, PNG, GIF, PSD.
• Save collage as PDF file.
• Export collage to iPhoto directly.
• Set collage as desktop wallpaper.
• Share collage via Facebook and E-mail. For Mac OS X 10.8 or later, you can also directly share the collage to Message, AirDrop, Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr within Picture Collage Maker.
• Print collage directly. 

App Pro’s: Easy to use, drag and drop, hundreds of templates

App Con’s: Pricey for a desktop app in today's app economy, big watermarks during trial, a few nag screens

Conclusion: Picture Collage Maker is an app that anyone and everyone can enjoy. You're limited only by your own creativity and cache of digital photos. One of the great things about scrapbooking is that you create each page separately, by hand to fulfill or satisfy a specific theme. The process here is no different, however this is both a pro and a con.

When you're scrapbooking by hand, its easy to get lost in the crafting as you draw, cut out, paint and construct each 2D and 3D element on its own. In many cases, depending on how fast you worked, you could work on a single page for days. With PCM, that's reduced to hours. You work so quickly with PCM, that it might be a really good idea that when you chose a theme or a template, you could apply those choices to an unlimited number of pages, without having to create each page individually. Its just a thought...

When you are ready to commit this to paper or some other media, you can export and share your work in any number of different image formats or to a PDF. However, you need to be aware that any work you create with the app during the trial period is going to be marred by a huge unmistakable watermark in the middle of it. If you want to save any of your work, you're going to need to buy the full version.

In all, this is a nice app, albeit a bit pricey at $40USD in today's app market. However, I really like what it does and I'm glad that I found Picture Collage Maker...and I think you will be, too.