Create photo and video collages to play on your TV with this Mac app

Wouldn't it be great if you could put together a combination of photos and videos and then show them off on the big screen TV in your lounge? PhotoVideoCollage enables you to do just that.

The app is straightforward to use and in five to ten minutes you could have a great collage of photos and videos to play on your Mac or TV.

Choose a collage layout

There are three sections in the app window and the first of these enables you to choose a layout for the collage. There are 38 of them in the free version of the app and over 70 in the Pro version.

There are portrait and landscape layouts and space for one to six photos and videos. Some would work great on an iPhone or iPad in portrait mode while others are obviously designed for the Mac or widescreen TV.

Add photos and videos

Choose a template and it is displayed in the middle section of the app window. Clicking the empty slots enables photos and videos from your Photos library to be selected and added. It is possible to change layouts after adding photos and it automatically places the photos. If there are more slots in the new template then more photos or videos can be added.

Photos and videos can be dragged to swap them around, so you can easily experiment with their positioning. A zoom control enables photos and videos to be shrunk or enlarged so you can crop unnecessary items from the edges and focus on the subject. Videos can be trimmed too.

Configure the collage

The third section on the right has three tabs and these enable the layout, settings and tabs to be customised. On the Layout tab the border width can be set and the corners of the photos and videos rounded. A colour or texture can be selected for the background – the gaps between the photos/videos.

On the Settings tab there is an option to load a sound track, such as your favourite music. The audio volume of the video and the music track can be adjusted separately, which is useful when you want background music, but not too loud.

The Text tab enables a title to be added to the collage and the position, font and colour can be selected.

Save the collage

After building the collage and setting all the options, it can be saved to disk as a .mov or .mp4 file in several resolutions from quite small all the way up to 4k.

This movie can then be played using the QuickTime Player on the Mac and then of course, the output can be sent to an Apple TV if you have one connected to the big screen in your lounge.

Conclusion

I used the full version of the app (a license code was provided by Bits&Coffee) and the main limitations of the free version are a watermark on the output video and around half the templates.

There are several areas where the app could be improved. For example, the text stays on the video throughout and it would be nice if it could be removed after 5 seconds or so.

There is no photo output and creating a collage of photos and saving it as a video is boring. It would be useful if a photo collage could be saved as a JPEG. PhotoVideoCollage is best when one or more videos are included in the collage.

Although there are a lot of templates, they consist entirely of rectangles. It does not need more templates, but more variety would be useful, such as a circular photo slot or an angled one.

Some photo filters or even basic brightness and contrast adjustment would be useful.

I like the app. It is not perfect and there are several areas where it could be improved, but you can still have fun creating collages of photos and videos. However, there is a lot of competition in collage makers and it is a tough market. It is not the best or the worst of its type and I would suggest trying the free one first.

App: PhotoVideoCollage
Price: Free / $9.99 (Mac App Store)
By: Bits&Coffee
Size: 19 MB installed
MacOS: 10.10 or later
Verdict: An inexpensive utility for making collages from videos and photos