Social Collage Help
Table of Contents
1 Overview
Social Collage is a fantastic Mac OS X app that allows you to take images from Instagram, Facebook, or your Desktop and automatically generate collages or life posters out of them.
1.1 Choosing a Product
Once you start the app, it will ask you what kind of product you want to create. You can always cancel here and define this later. You can also change this decision later. However, setting this early will help you design the print product exactly as it will be printed later on. There's a wide range of products, from small cards to big posters in standard or high quality.
1.2 Selecting Templates
After selecting the product, you can choose a template to start with. Social Collage contains many beautiful templates for a variety of tasks. New templates will also be added with upcoming updates of the app. After you decided for a template, select it and click the "Ok" button.
The next step is to import images from social networks into your collage. If you keep the "Start with Social Import" checkbox checked, Social Collage will go to this next step right away.
2 Collage
Social Collages consists out of multiple elements, such as background images, text objects, images, and, of course, the collage itself which is a matrix of many images aligned in a perfect grid.
Important: Not all amounts of images can be aligned perfectly in a rectangle. Sometimes, there will be too many or too few images to form a perfect grid. If that is the case, Social Collage will display an alert to inform you that you'll need to add more images or remove some so that it can compute a perfect grid. This limitation is mathematical and can't really be changed.
Social Collage will do its best to center and align the images so that it still looks great even with a non-perfect amount of images.
Example 1: An imperfect layout. Social Collage can't create a perfect grid.
The small "Alert" icon in the top right will tell you how to achieve a perfect layout, if you click it.
Example 2: Removed some images, now the grid is perfect.
Instead of removing images, you can also change the margins to affect the outcome of the positioning algorithm.
2.1 Importing Photos into a Collage
Social Collage documents can contain images from multiple sources, such as Instagram Profiles, Instagram Tags, Facebook Albums or Local / Desktop files. In order to add a source, simply click the "Import" button in the toolbar, or the small "+" button in the "Sources" inspector located at the right side of the window.
2.1.1 From Facebook
In order to import your Facebook images, you have to connect Social Collage with Facebook. To do that, simply:
- Select the "Facebook" tab
- Click the "Connect With Facebook" button,
- Wait a bit for Social Collage to connect with the Facebook server
- Enter your Facebook credentials
- And finally grant Social Collage access
Social Collage will not store any of your information, it will only download the images from the selected albums for import onto your computer.
Now, you can select the album you want to import, and click the "Import" button at the bottom.
To log out of Facebook again, simply go into the Social Collage Preferences and click the "Logout from Facebook" button
2.1.2 From Instagram
In order to import your Instagram images, you have to connect Social Collage with Instagram. To do that, simply:
- Select the "Instagram" tab
- Click the "Connect With Instagram" button,
- Wait a bit for Social Collage to connect with the Instagram server
- Enter your Instagram credentials
- And finally grant Social Collage access
Social Collage will not store any of your information, it will only download the selected profile or tag onto your computer.
To log out of Instagram again, simply go into the Social Collage Preferences and click the "Logout from Instagram" button
- Importing an Instagram profile
Simply insert the name of the profile you intend to import into the search bar and hit enter. Social Collage will then display a list of all results. If you found the right profile, simply select it and click the "Import" button.
For your convenience, you can also just click the "or import my profile" button to directly import your own profile.
- Importing an Instagram Tag
You can also search for the contents of an Instagram tag, such as #carlswedding2014. However, due to Instagram API limitations, Social Collage can only load up to 3.000 images for a tag, starting with the most recent image.
- Search for the tag you wish to import
- Hit the enter button
- Social Collage will show you how many images for this tag exists
- You can define how many you wish to import. Keep in mind that the more images you put into a collage, the smaller the individual images will be.
2.1.3 Local Files
You can also import files from your local disk / desktop. Simply select the "Files" tab and then click the "Select Files" button. You will be able to select images from a folder.
Note: Those images will not be saved in the Social Collage document. So when you delete or move those images afterwards, Social Collage won't be able to find them anymore and you won't be able to print your document.
2.2 Sorting, aligning and Filtering Collage Photos
Social Collage offers many functions for defining how you wish the collage to look. You can define filters, orders, margins, colors, padding, and much more.
2.2.1 Deleting Individual Images
If you just want to delete one or more individual image from the imported images, you can simply select it by clicking it. Then select "Edit -> Delete" in the Social Collage menu, and the selected images will be deleted.
2.2.2 Filtering by a time range
Right below the Sources inspector, you can see a time slider and two datetime input fields. By moving the slider around or changing the value in the fields, you can define the visible time range for the images in the collage. This makes it easy to just display the images made in June 2014, for example.
2.2.3 Sort Order
Social Collage offers several sorting options in the "Sorting" inspector:
- Sort by
Allows you to define by which metric to sort the images of the collage. Of note, the "Orientation" sort allows you to sort images by how landscape and how portrait they are. This leads to much smoother layouts if you have a lot of differently sized images.
- Sort Start
Where should Social Collage display the oldest images, in which direction should it then go up the time range. Sort start allows to define whether to start in the bottom left or the top right, etc.
2.2.4 Filter by Likes or Comments
For images that you imported from Facebook or Instagram, you can define to only show images that have a certain amount of likes or comments. Simply move the sliders, and the lower quality images will automatically disappear.
2.2.5 Filter by Tags
For images that you imported from Facebook for Instagram, you can define which tags not to display. If some of your images have the tag "#boring" you can uncheck the "#boring" tag and all images with the #boring tag will disappear.
2.2.6 Filter by Tagged Users
For images that you imported from Facebook or Instagram and that have people tagged in them, you can hide these images by unchecking the persons in question. Say if Carl can be seen on 10 pictures and he is also tagged on these 10 pictures, then deselecting Carl will hide these 10 pictures.
2.3 Collage Design
Social collage offers many possibilities to change the layout of the collage element.
2.3.1 Centering
In the "Sorting" inspector, you will find two checkboxes for centering:
- Center Collage
This will center the collage within the margins that you defined. Social Collage can't always solve the task of aligning the images perfectly in a grid (sometimes there're too many, sometimes too few images). If that happens, Social Collage might have unequal margins for the images. The "Center Collage" setting will then center the collage images within the space that you defined via margins.
- Center dangling items in final row.
Social Collage can't always solve the task of aligning the images perfectly in a grid (sometimes there're too many, sometimes too few images). The "Center Dangling" setting will center the remaining images in the last row so that they have equal space to the left and right border.
Center Dangling Example (top line)
2.3.2 Collage Layout and Design
- Margins
The "Left, Right, Top, Bottom" Margins define how much space to leave at the individual sides between the border of the document and the collage.
- Padding
The padding slider defines how much padding to leave between the individual images within a collage
- Colors
The Document color defines the absolute background color of the document (the "Paper" color) The Collage color defines the background color of the section where the collage sits (i.e. everything enclosed by the margins that you defined)
- Border
You can define a border that will be applied to each individual image in the collage. You can set the border size, the border color, and you can give the border a radius for "rounded rectangle" borders.
- Crop
If you import images from anything but Instagram, some of your images will be portrait, others will be landscape. This may look not exactly as you'd like. The "Crop rectangular pictures" will crop all images into a quadratic shape so that the whole layout will be much more uniform. It does this by cropping to the center of the image.
3 Objects
In addition to the collage functionality, Social Collage allows you to enhance and refine the looks of your prints with objects such as texts or images.
You select Objects by clicking them in the main view, or by selecting them in the "Objects" list.
3.1 Adding Objects
You can easily add them with the buttons in the toolbar:
- Insert Images:
- Insert Shapes:
- Insert Texts:
Objects can be managed via the "Objects" list in the lower right of the Social Collage Window.
The "Lock" icon will lock the selected object, so that it can't be selected anymore in the main view. The "Eye" icon will hide the object from the main view.
3.2 The Object Properties Inspector
Once you select an object, the "Properties" inspector will appear. It allows you to define various object properties: border, position, size, rotation, opacity and size lock.
Shape Objects also allow you to define the background color as a gradient.
The "Size Lock" button allows you to define that this object can only be scaled up or down proportional in size. You can set this by clicking the small "Lock" button between the "Size" input fields.
3.3 Deleting Objects
To delete an object, simply select it, and click "Edit -> Delete" in the Social Collage Main Menu
3.4 Moving & Rotating Objects
Once you select an object, four handles / white blocks will appear, one in every corner. By moving the handles you can resize the object.
Some objects, such as images, have the "Size Lock" enabled by default, and you need to unset it if you want to resize those objects in non-proportional ways.
Finally, a selected object will also display a small bar with a circle at the top. When you move this circle, the object will be rotated.
3.5 Changing the object hierachy
By clicking the "Forward" 
button in the toolbar, you move an object on top of the object that it is currenly below. The "Backward" button in the toolbar does the opposite.
3.6 Setting objects to full document size
- The small button in the Properties inspector next to the "Position" settings will change the size and position of an object to its perfect fitting size.
- The small button next to the "Size" settings will make the object "full screen", i.e. it will totally fill out the document.
4 Ordering, Printing & Sharing
Social Collage offers manifold ways of getting your document out of the app.
Important: If you imported images from Facebook or Instagram, when initially importing images, Social Collage will only download low quality versions, so that you can start working faster. However, when you're ready to print, Social Collage will then have to download high quality versions of these images. This may take some time, depending on how many images you're trying to print.
4.1 Proofing
Whenever you're trying to share, export, or print a document, Social Collage will perform several proof checks to make sure that the printed / exported document will be of a very high quality. If, for example, some of your images are too small, Social Collage will point this out. You can then set to fix these issues. However, you can also just ignore them and continue printing.
4.2 Ordering as a Poster or Card
The easiest way to convert your digital design into a realy world product is by clicking the "Order" button 
. This is a very easy way of taking your image, uploading it to a print provider, and ordering it as a print that will arrive at your doorstep within days.
4.3 Sharing on Social Networks
Alternatively, you may want to just share the images on a Social Network, such as Facebook. To achieve that, simply click the "Share" button 
in the toolbar. Social Collage will use any of the Social Networks that you've defined in Mac OS X.
4.4 Printing
You can also print any layout on your local or network printer that you've set up in Mac OS X. To achieve that, simply click the "Print" button 
in the toolbar.
4.5 Exporting as PDF or PNG
Finally, you may want to export the document and then continue working with it in another app. To do that, select "File -> Export" in the Main Menu, and follow the instructions on screen.
5 Lists of ordered products
If you've ordered products via the "Ordering" function, you can always see a list of all your orders from within Social Collage. Simply select "File -> List of Orders…" from the Main Menu.
6 Contact
If you'd like to submit a bug, or give feedback on the app or on a print that you've ordered, simply click the "Contact" button in the toolbar and select whether you'd like to give app feedback or whether you'd like to comment on a print that you've ordered.