A cutout collage maker that starts with dinner.

The craft

What makes a cutout collage look good.

Whatever app you use, the same handful of choices separates a collage that looks designed from one that looks dropped:

• One hero. Make the dish of the night twice the size of everything else. The eye needs somewhere to land.
• Overlap a little. Let pieces cover each other by a tenth or so. Floating cut-outs with gaps between them look like a menu, not a scrapbook.
• Tilt, but not all the same way. A few degrees left, a few right. Identical angles look stamped.
• Give each piece an edge. A thin white die-cut border separates a dark dish from a dark background.
• Pull the background from the food. The pink of a raspberry tart, the green of a matcha latte. A flat colour beats a busy photo.
• Two typefaces at most. One bold for the place, one handwritten for the note.
• Add one scrap of context. A date stamp, the bill, a ticket stub — ephemera makes it a memory instead of a menu.

Two routes

The long way, and the PlateDiary way.

By hand, a food collage means: remove the background from each photo one by one, export every piece, open a design app, import them, arrange, add text, export. It works, and it takes a while for a table of six dishes.

In PlateDiary the pieces already exist, so the steps are shorter:

1. Open the momentEvery night out is a moment, with its saves already cut out.
2. Open Share StudioPick a template — or tap Surprise and let it deal one.
3. Make it yoursDrag, resize and tilt saves; add words, doodles, a GIF or a keepsake card.
4. ExportSave a picture, or a looping six-second video for your story.

Templates

Start from a template, or let it surprise you.

Share Studio’s templates each set a mood: Default, Receipt, Postcard, Date night, Scrapbook, Spotlight, Menu, Pile, Picnic, Party and Mosaic, plus a throw-it-all-on layout for big nights (Mosaic and that one want ten or more saves). Shuffle rearranges what you have; Surprise deals something new.

Each save can wear an outline: Lift, Pop, Line, Dash, Holo, Glitter, Neon, Sketch, Retro or Halftone — or none at all.

Keepsakes

Keepsake cards made from the night itself.

This is the part a general collage maker can’t do. PlateDiary already knows the place, the date, who was there and how many times you’ve been, so it can print that as paper-style ephemera: a receipt, a ticket stub, a postmark, a film date stamp, an “Nth time” rosette, your stars, a sticky note and a companions tag. Tell the story deals a matching set in one step.

The receipt card can show prices, but that’s off by default — a collage for your story rarely needs the bill.

Handmade touches

Handwriting, doodles and GIFs.

• Words with eight backgrounds — card, pill, marker, tape, bubble, ticket, brush and outline — in 13 colours.
• Draw with small, medium and large brushes: arrows to the best dish, a heart around dessert.
• GIFs from a search in the Overlay tab. Searching needs a connection; any GIF you pick is kept on your phone, so the design still opens offline.
• Motion, so saves move in the video export.

Sizes

Sized for stories and posts.

Export a picture (PNG) or a looping six-second video (MP4). A transparent background becomes cream in a video, since video has no see-through.

Free and Premium

The free share sheet and Share Studio.

You can open Share Studio and design with your own saves before you have Premium; exporting is the Premium part. Designs save themselves and wait in the Studio saves gallery on the You tab.