About the board

ImageCollageMaker is one tool: a rectangle of a size you choose, and whatever you decide to put on it. There is nothing to sign up for, nothing to install, and no account behind any of it.

Why an empty rectangle

Most collage sites hand you an arrangement and ask you to drop photographs into it. That is a genuinely good product for four holiday pictures and a square to post. It is the wrong product for a folder of a hundred and sixty, because the interesting decisions — what is large, what overlaps what, where the eye lands first — are exactly the ones an arrangement has already made for you.

So this board starts empty and stays empty until you fill it. The grid generator exists because rows and columns are tedious to place by hand, but even that hands back loose frames rather than a structure, and a run of it is one keystroke away from being undone.

What it deliberately is not

• Not a page-layout program. No text, no shapes, no trim marks. A poster that needs a headline gets one wherever it is being printed.
• Not a photo editor. Crop inside a frame, change opacity, turn it. There is no exposure slider and there will not be one.
• Not built for a phone. It works on one, and the tray becomes a strip you can scroll. But this is a mouse-shaped tool: two hundred frames and a rotation arm want a pointer and a large screen, and pretending otherwise would waste your time.
• Not a place to store anything. The arrangement is written to your browser so you can come back to it. The photographs are not written anywhere at all.

How it is paid for

Advertising is meant to pay for it, and none is running yet: the domain is still waiting on AdSense review, so no band appears on any page today. Where they may go is already settled — one below the reading material on a tool page, two in the longer notes, and none above the board, beside it or inside a panel. Each one will hold its height before it loads, so nothing on the page moves when an advertisement arrives late. Those placement rules are checked by the build rather than remembered by a person, which is why they will still hold on the day the switch is flipped.

Who makes it

It is part of a small family of single-purpose picture tools, each one built around a job that is badly served by a general editor. They share an engine and a set of standards — what happens to a file you open, how a limit is explained, how a failure is worded — and nothing else. This one was built around a problem the others do not have: holding two hundred photographs in one tab without running the browser out of memory.