Why?

Every year right before christmas my wife and I faced the same question: “Which gifts should we make to our parents, grandparents and friends?”. Since we have kids there is a lot more to do before christmas and a lot less time to prepare gifts. So we simplified things. Every member of our family and our best friends get the same gift. It is a handmade calendar with twelve photos of our family…well mostly photos of our kids, because they are the interesting part here.

But year after year it gets harder to select twelve single photos to represent a complete year in our family. This is why we decided to create twelve photo collages for this years christmas gift.

What?

In the past I used Picasa sometimes to create photo collages. But unfortunately Google decided to shut down Picasa. So I had to look for a good alternative which I could use on my Manjaro Linux based Asus N552VX Laptop.

A quick google search brought me to Photo Collage and a quick glance at the README looked very promising.

How?

Searching the official repos and the AUR

The first step was to ask pacman if Photo Collage was available from the offical Manjaro repositories.

$ pacman -Ss photocollage

But I had no luck. Until now Photo Collage didn’t make it to the offical repos.

As a second step I gave the AUR (Arch User Repository) a try and found a user provided package for Photo Collage.

Using Manjaro for a few weeks now I haven’t had the necessity to install a package from the AUR and for whatever reason I wanted to avoid using the AUR.

So I headed down the “go get the source and build it” road.

Go get the source and build it

Photo Collage is written in python and before starting the program some additional python packages need to be installed.

$ sudo pacman -S python-pillow python-gobject 

Now go and get the source. To accomplish this you need to have git installed.

$ git clone https://github.com/adrienverge/PhotoCollage.git

That’s it…show time.

$ cd PhotoCollage
$ PYTHONPATH=. bin/photocollage

This command should start Photo Collage:

Now you can add some photos to your collage. Depending on how many photos you have selected the software generates a first draft for the layout.

More often than not it is the case that the first draft does not match your expectations. You should use the “regenerate” button and a new version of the collage is generated.

You can undo or redo any modifications by clicking on the “left arrow” (undo) or “right arrow” (redo) buttons.

What next?

If your are satisfied with your photo collage you can save the final version via “Save poster” button.

In case you know some good alternative tools for creating photo collages on linux then just let me know in the comments.