Instagram releases Layout, its own collage-creating app

It’s odd, considering its status and media impact, that Instagram hasn’t gotten on this particular ball before. Layout is a completely independent tool that lets you create collages of your photos and manipulate them as desired (including with filters). You can post your collages to both Instagram and Facebook or any other social network associated with your smartphone. Having already been launched for iOS, Layout has now just been launched for Android.

You don’t need to do any kind of registration or login, as you’ll be working exclusively with your local files. You can take images from your galleries or take them there with your device’s camera, and include up to nine of them in one collage. Even if you select one of the preset blocks.

You can modify the size of each square and rotate or change the images on-site, and once that’s done, share the collage via any of the apps on your phone, with special protagonism on the interface for Instagram and Facebook (obviously!).

With this maneuver Instagram aims to brush aside all those apps like Retrica for creating additional effects, although perhaps it would have been a better idea to directly integrate the collage-creation tool into the offical app. But as the design standards say in terms of simplicity and mono-functionality: Keep It Simple, Stupid!