ShapeX

Although some may consider it old-school, creating photo collages for friends or family is still a great way to express your appreciation, not to mention a fun gift idea.

There are numerous tools designed to help you put together collages out of pictures, from simple to comprehensive, so finding an app that truly brings something new to the table is rare. Nevertheless, we were impressed with the sheer simplicity and elegance approached by ShapeX, a software project that has been only recently released.

Wrapped in a no-install package, this program puts emphasis on the shape of the resulted collage, having masks ready for animals, modern objects, numbers, skulls, smiley faces, text, and others. It's incredibly easy to explore its features as well as to save the resulting collages as JPG or PNG images.

Getting started with ShapeX means importing a bunch of pictures from your computer. If you don't currently have any images at hand, you can load the samples provided by the developer, which can be used to demonstrate how it works. You can create new masks by using your own images (they will be transformed into cutouts).

All the photographs are automatically jumbled and shown in a collage in the main window. Beneath this preview lies a filmstrip where you can try the various shapes scattered across different categories.

To the top and left are buttons for making tweaks, whether you want to adjust the amount of tiny pictures, their size, orientation or white border thickness. Four collage styles can be used (on top), focusing on white borders, square or circle or hexagon shapes pictures with no special effects applied to them. Shadow can be added too.

Although ShapeX is not necessarily rich in features, time passes by without even noticing when you're discovering everything it has to offer. We can't wait to see what the next update will bring.