Creating a photo collage from your digital photos should be easy, right? It is unless you have very specific needs for how you want your collage to look like.

In my case, I have just returned from a year-long, around-the-world travel with 25,000+ pictures, and I wanted to arrange some 500 of them in a contact-sheet-like 30”x20” photo collage poster to hang on a wall. I wanted each picture to have a custom description and the GPS location where the picture was taken, extracted from the EXIF metadata.

When I started looking for a solution, no tool out there did exactly what I wanted, so I created my own: tjanczuk/mkcollage. Here is a sample of what the tool can create, with a few pictures from south of the equator:

What can you do with tjanczuk/mkcollage?

• Use image files from your local drive to create contact-sheet-like, poster-size photo collages.
• Export the final collage image as PNG, JPEG, or WEBP.
• Set the desired collage width and individual picture height.
• Annotate images on the collage with custom descriptions or based on EXIF information in the image.
• Select images to include or order images based on image metadata, including EXIF information (the example above used a filter that only included images with latitude below 8 degrees South).
• Rich customization using CSS.

Check out the documentation for details, and happy collaging!