Apps for combining photos

Diptic is really pretty simple: combine two, three, or four of your photos like a diptych, triptych, or polyptych. A diptych is actually an ancient Greek art form linking two matched plates. Diptic brings that idea to the 21st century. The app is easy to use with adjustable border width and colors. In-app purchases give you more flexibility in shape; you can get rectangles instead of the just the standard squares. It’s universal, so use it on all of your iDevices. Diptic has spawned a thousand imitators; some better, most not as good. The square-shaped results have made this app extremely popular with the Instagram crowd.

This one takes the idea of Diptic and improves upon it, frankly. Frame Magic has a great deal more flexibility than Diptic does. Using sliders, you control the ratio/shape/size of the overall photo PLUS each photo inside, thickness of the border, shape of the corner (square or rounded), and shadow effect. You just have a lot more control and flexibility here. Make your frame any color of the rainbow or choose from a number of frame patterns if you like. The creative possibilities are endless. And, it's universal, so buy it just once and use it on your iPhone, iPod touch and/or iPad.

This one is very much like Diptic, only free and ad-supported. You don’t get the adjustable borders, but you do get the option to leave some spaces with just color in them rather than photos. It's not the best of the genre since it lacks flexibility, but it's free, and a good way to see if you like this sort of app.

So, moving beyond the Diptic-type (combining just a few photos) apps, Photoshake is a fun app that lets you choose a template for multiple photos. Or, simply choose the photos and shake to let the app do the choosing for you. Choose from a variety of frames and multi-photo grids. Select all the photos that you want to use, even dozens if you like, and then shake. If you don’t like the result, shake again -- keep shaking until you have just the photo arrangement you like. You can upload your results to over a dozen different social networking sites directly from the app.

Something like Diptic, but not really, ComicStrip allows you to combine up to five photos in rectangular frame. Choose a template and add the photos of your choice. Then you can add captions, speech bubbles, and stickers to your creations. You could actually create a comic book of your photos with this universal app, but I think it’s just a fun way to combine photos in a single frame and add your captions and stickers right within the app.

This is a really different sort of app; unique and cool. It’s not exactly a photo collage, and not exactly a panorama, but somewhere in between. You just gotta see it. You take photos within the app, moving your arm in an arc as you do so. The pictures will overlap somewhat, and you can choose different ways to display them - like a stack of photos strewn on a table, or something a bit more organized. It’s universal, so you can use it on any iDevice with a camera.

But what if you just want to create a collage to your exact specifications? This is the go-to collage creating app. Select a background from their dozen or so templates, one of their add-on packs (for in-app purchase), or from your own photo library. Adjust the canvas color, brightness, orientation, aspect ratio, and dimension. Add photos, clip art, and text as desired. Manipulate each object with your fingers; make it larger, smaller, or rotate it. Adjust the transparency of each item and move it on top of or underneath other items in the collage. Basically, if you can think it, you can do it with this app. If you’re not sure, try the free lite version, which still has most of the features of the paid version.

This fun app is like a collage app, but the edges of each shot are fuzzy. The results are dreamy and artsy-looking. For some reason it brings to mind the opening shot of an 80's soap opera. There is also a free, lite version you can try.

Now this app is a REALLY different way to combine your photos. Essentially, you fracture your photos and recombine them into a cubist masterpiece. It’s great if you have a lot of colorful photos you want to blend together. You won’t be able to see a lot of detail from each photo, but the effect is unique. Fracture is a lot of fun.

This fun app turns a single photo into a cool mosaic made up of all your other photos (or photos of your choice) as the tiles. It’s a universal app, so a single purchase allows you to use the app on every iDevice you own.

Now, getting into more "serious" iphoneography apps -- every photographer with an iPhone ought to have this app. Simply take photos, up, down, left, right, and Autostitch will combine them into a single panoramic (or shape of your choice) shot, after the fact, at your leisure. No need to take the shots within the app; use your favorite camera app. This is very easy to use, and yet the results are so professional.

Union is a fantastic app that basically holds your hand through the procedure of masking a blending photos together to create a new one. First, you will choose your background. Next you will choose your foreground photo. The last step is where you will begin masking your photo by erasing what you don't want showing from the foreground photo. Did you mess up? No problem, simply hit the undo button or use the draw button to fill in what you took out. Once you're finished you can export to your photo album or Instagram. If you have more than you'd like to add to the photo, simply flatten your image and add a new foreground on top of that.

SplitCam is for the person that doesn't want to fiddle with editing photos to combine them. This app does all the work for you. Adjust the split on your screen for your camera until it's to your liking, take your photo, and take your next photo. The app will then generate a photo containing the two you just snapped. If you don't like it where splits you can still adjust that by swiping to the left or right. If you'd like to be able to split the image in any direction, you can, but you'd have to upgrade to the pro version for that.

MixBooth is a great photo combining app that will keep you laughing for hours on end. It's not a traditional photo editing app, but it does combine photos of two different people and makes a whole different person. What it does is take the face of Person 1 and puts it onto the body of Person 2. The results are hilarious and while some results aren't spot on, a majority are.