Fun new app by Instagram, designed to create photo collages. From the company’s blog:

Today we’re announcing Layout from Instagram, a new app that lets you easily combine multiple photos into a single image. It’s fun, it’s simple and it gives you a new way to flex your creativity.

After Hyperlapse, Instagram continues to build dedicated utilities without cluttering the main Instagram experience (which has already gotten more complex over the years). I’d argue that photo collages are more mainstream than slow-motion videos, and Layout seems to lack the impressive technical feats of Hyperlapse. It’s polished, intuitive, and I like how it simplifies controls for resizing and mirroring, but it doesn’t showcase any breakthrough technology. It doesn’t need to, though, considering the popularity of slightly more complicated collage apps such as Diptic.

Nathan Ingraham writes at The Verge:

Layout is a determinedly simple app — choose your pictures, choose your layout, and make a few quick adjustments. That’s all it does, and its designers are happy to admit it. Even as Instagram’s flagship app has gotten more flexible, adding more granular editing tools to the filters it first became known for, the company wants to keep advanced techniques like Hyperlapse and collages in their own apps.

Curious to see if this will take off (my friends will be a fascinating testing ground).