Picture Collage Maker Lite for Mac

Picture Collage Maker Lite for Mac is a free, nicely designed, easy-to-use photo collage maker for creating greetings cards, collages, or scrapbooks for special moments, and it has 150 great templates. Unfortunately, almost all of them are locked, despite the fact that the promotional material talks about more than 100 being available, which is annoying.

Although the design resembles other applications available on the market, such as CollageIt for Mac, Picture Collage Maker doesn't just copy its competitors. At first launch, users will be asked to choose a template from the long list of those available, but this is where they will start to come up against the application's limitations. As most of the 150 templates are locked, they will be forced to use the ones available for free, which are pretty basic. However, this is where creativity comes into play. Whether you choose a blank template or a free template, you can populate the white canvas by using the available tools, Mask, Frame, and Clipart, in addition to dragging and dropping photos into the work space. The list of available Masks is decent, and we liked how a combination of a good mask and frame resulted in a great collage. What we missed, though, was an easy way to adjust the distance between pictures.

Overall, Picture Collage Maker Lite is very easy to use, but in case novices don't find it so, the Online Help provides detailed descriptions and tutorials. And once your artwork is done, you can share it by exporting it as a JPEG, PDF, or custom-sized, e-mail-friendly image.

While we enjoyed using the collage maker, we were annoyed by the continuous pressure to upgrade to the Pro version given the limited number of free templates.