Instagram has launched a new feature to help with the presentation of photos on its platform.
The tool, which is being called Layout, will allow users to create personalised collages that can then be posted to their news feeds.
The Layout app, which will act as a standalone platform away from the main Instagram service, will work in one of two ways. Users can either select up to nine existing pictures from the galleries of their smartphones and app-enabled devices, or take a series of photographs that will then be merged into one image.
Once all of the pictures have been gathered for the collage, the content can be manually rearranged into different sizes and positions, while a number of layouts can also be chosen.
Having created the collage, social media users can then upload it directly to either Instagram or Twitter. It can also be saved into their mobile’s image gallery or uploaded to other apps, such as Snapchat or Dropbox.
However, if users want to post their new Layout collages to Twitter, they will have to relay it through the phone’s gallery first. This appears to be part of Facebook-owned Instagram’s campaign to draw traffic away from its social competitor, with it having already stopped people from posting images from its main service directly onto the microblogging site.
Although the new Instagram Layout app is initially only available on iPhones, a blog post from the photo-sharing site stated that it was working on releasing an Android version “in the coming months”.
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