How To Make a Collage on Pinterest (Desktop and Mobile)

Pinterest has a collage tool built into the mobile app and the desktop site. You open the create menu, choose Collage, add pins as cutouts, arrange them on the canvas, then publish the result as a pin. On a phone it takes about five minutes once you’ve done it once.

The parts that trip people up sit either side of those five minutes. Finding the button in the first place. Realizing, after you publish, that the layout is now locked. Getting the finished collage off Pinterest and into a client deck, an Instagram story or a print.

Both routes are below, in order, with the awkward bits included.

Three different things people call a Pinterest collage

Sorting this out first saves a lot of hunting for a button that was never where you thought.

The first is the built-in tool, Pinterest Collages. You choose pins, cut out the object you want from each one, and layer those cutouts on a canvas. It publishes back to Pinterest as a pin. Nothing else needed.

The second is a collage you design elsewhere and pin afterwards. You build it in Canva, Adobe Express, PicsArt or Photoshop, export it as a JPG or PNG, then upload it to Pinterest like any other image. You get proper text control and precise spacing. You also get more steps.

The third is not really a collage. Saving thirty pins to a board called Kitchen Ideas gives you a grid that looks collage-like, but a board is a collection and a collage is one finished image. Boards are for gathering. Collages are for deciding. If gathering is what you’re actually doing, selecting multiple pins at once will get you there faster.

One more thing worth clearing up. Shuffles is Pinterest’s separate collage app for iOS and Android, and it still has its own help pages. Its ideas now sit inside the main app, so unless you already use Shuffles, the tool in Pinterest itself is where to start.

What to check before you open the editor

Two minutes here prevents most of the problems people hit halfway through.

Your account type changes the menu. Collages work on personal and business accounts, but the route differs. Personal accounts get there from the create icon. Business accounts usually find it under the hamburger menu, or through Create on the profile page. If a tutorial doesn’t match your screen, this is normally why.

Your app version matters. Pinterest says in its own documentation that the collage tools may not be available on every device. Old phones, old operating systems and out-of-date app builds are the usual causes. Update before you assume anything is broken.

Three sources feed a collage: pins from Pinterest, images you upload yourself, and cutouts you’ve made before. That last one is the most useful. Cut out a chair once and it stays in your library, so your fifth collage takes a fraction of the time your first did.

How to make a collage on Pinterest in the mobile app (iOS and Android)

The app is the fuller version of the tool. Templates, drafts and remixing all live here.

1. Open the create menu. Tap the plus icon at the bottom of the screen, then pick Collage.

2. Choose your starting point. You get four options: a blank canvas, a saved draft, a template, or a remix of someone else’s collage. Use a template for your first attempt. Composition is the hard part of collage-making, and a template hands you one that already works.

3. Add your cutouts. Tap the plus icon inside the editor. From there you can browse pins by interest, search Pinterest, pull from pins you’ve already saved, or reuse cutouts from earlier.

Search for the object, not the scene. “Rattan chair” gives you product shots on plain backgrounds. “Living room” gives you rooms, and rooms cut out badly.

4. Cut out the part you want. Select a pin, then tap the object you want to keep. Pinterest lifts it out and drops it onto your canvas. Tap Add to accept it, or Edit to tidy the selection.

This step decides whether your collage looks sharp or messy. Clear edges against a contrasting background cut out cleanly. A gray sweater photographed against a gray wall comes out ragged, and no amount of arranging hides it.

5. Layer and arrange. Drag to move, pinch to resize, twist to rotate, tap to bring forward or send back. Build from the back: background pieces first, then the middle, then the one element you want the eye to land on.

6. Background and finishing. Set a color or an image behind everything, then add effects if you want them. Less is better here. One flat color usually looks more considered than a busy photo competing with your cutouts.

7. Publish, or don’t. Tap Next. You can save it as a draft, download it to your device, share it elsewhere, or add a title and description and publish it as a pin. If it’s going out publicly, this is where a well-written description and the right keywords do the work the picture can’t.

My honest advice: save it as a draft and look again tomorrow. Your editing options narrow sharply once it goes live.

iPhone and Android behave the same way throughout. The differences show up afterwards, in the share sheet and in where the file lands. Photos on iOS, Gallery or Downloads on Android.

How to make a collage on Pinterest on desktop

Desktop is the lighter version of the tool, and for a busy layout on a big canvas, the easier one.

1. Find the Collage option. Log in, click the square-plus icon in the left navigation, choose Collage. On a business account, open the hamburger menu and pick Create collage, or go through Create on your profile.

2. Add pins or your own images. Start from a pin, or upload something from your computer using the sticker-image icon.

3. Make your cutouts with the cropper. Click the plus icon to bring in a whole pin, or select a pin and crop out the part you want. The desktop cropper is slower than tapping a phone screen and far more precise, which is what you want on a detailed image.

4. Arrange. Drag into position, resize with the handles, adjust the layering. A mouse beats a fingertip for fine work, and a bigger screen makes spacing problems obvious before you publish rather than after.

5. Add details and publish. Click Next, write your title and description, then hit Publish. It lands on your chosen board as a pin.

What you give up on desktop: the template library, the drafts system and the remix flow are all better developed in the app, and your saved cutouts are easier to reach on a phone. A split that works well in practice is arranging on desktop and finishing on mobile.

The Collage option is not showing. Here’s why

If Collage isn’t in your create menu, it’s almost always the app version, the account type, or a temporary Pinterest fault. Not something you’ve done.

Start with the app. Update it through the App Store or Google Play, then force-close and reopen it. The collage tool is one of the first things to go missing on an old build.

Then check where you’re looking. Business accounts don’t always show Collage in the same place, so try the hamburger menu and the Create option on your profile before deciding it’s gone.

After that, availability. Pinterest states that these tools may not be available on all devices, and that shoppable collages in particular have limited availability. If a feature you’ve seen in a tutorial isn’t on your screen, that’s often a staged rollout, not user error.

Sometimes it’s simply broken at Pinterest’s end. The Collage option vanished from the app’s create menu for a group of creators in late 2024, threads piled up in Pinterest’s business community, and it came back within days without anyone doing anything. If your app is current and your account type checks out, give it forty-eight hours.

One more thing to rule out. If you’re being asked to reconnect, or you’re seeing errors elsewhere in the app, you may be looking at a Pinterest authorization problem rather than a missing feature.

In the meantime, use the desktop site. The two rarely break together.

What you can change after publishing, and what you cannot

Very little, which is the most useful thing to know before you press the button.

Once a collage is live you can edit small details, such as the title and whether other people can remix it. The composition is fixed. Cutouts can’t be moved, swapped or removed. If the layout is wrong, your only real option is to delete it and publish a corrected version.

The remix setting is worth a moment’s thought. Leaving it on puts your work in front of more people, because remixes carry your collage into feeds you’d never reach. Switching it off keeps the composition yours. Creators using collages commercially tend to turn it off. People making mood boards for fun tend to leave it on.

Remixing other people’s work is a supported feature, not a loophole, and it’s the fastest way to learn composition. Just change enough that the result is clearly yours.

Drafts sit in the collage editor until you publish or delete them, so an unfinished idea can wait two weeks without any harm. Published collages are deleted the way you’d delete any pin, from the pin’s own menu.

Making a collage that is actually worth looking at

The mechanics take ten minutes to learn. This part takes longer.

Start with color, not with pins. Pick three or four colors before you open the editor. Cutouts chosen to fit a palette hold together. Cutouts chosen because each one is nice on its own usually don’t.

Choose source pins that cut out cleanly. Product photography on white or plain backgrounds is the easiest material to work with. Magazine-style shots, dark interiors and anything blurry will fight you the whole way.

When cutouts come out ragged, it’s almost always one of three things: the source image is low resolution, the object blends into its background, or the edges are genuinely difficult. Hair, leaves, fine chains. Swapping the source pin fixes this faster than editing the selection does.

On composition, keep it simple. One element should be clearly the largest and everything else supports it. Leave room at the edges. Odd-numbered groups look more natural than even ones, which is an old design habit that still holds up.

Build tall. Pinterest favors vertical pins at a 2:3 ratio, and 1000 x 1500 pixels is the standard working size. A square collage publishes fine, it just takes up less space in the feed and gets noticed less. If reach is the goal, what actually travels on Pinterest matters more than any single design choice, and the broader system for driving traffic from Pinterest matters more than either.

When a collage feels off and you can’t say why, three fixes solve most of it. Cut the number of elements by a third, widen the size gap between your largest and smallest piece, and swap a busy background for a flat color.

Can you use other people’s pins in your collage?

Inside Pinterest, mostly yes. Cutouts were built to be used on the platform and remixing is part of the design, so a collage made from pins and published back to Pinterest sits within how the feature is meant to work.

Outside Pinterest, be more careful. Selling a design, putting it in a client deck, printing it on something: the underlying images still belong to whoever made them. US fair use is narrower than people assume. It weighs the purpose of the use, how much of the original you took, and whether you’re competing with the original’s market. Commercial reuse of someone’s photograph because it suited your palette tends to fail on all three.

I’m not a lawyer and this isn’t legal advice, but the practical rule is simple. If money is attached to the output, use images you own or have licensed.

For anyone running a shop that’s less limiting than it sounds. Your own product photography makes better collages anyway, and you already have the images to build from. Pinterest links collages back to their source pins automatically, so crediting a creator you’ve leaned on costs nothing and tends to come back around.

Saving, downloading and reusing your collage

Most people don’t want the collage to stay on Pinterest. They want it in a deck, on a grid, or on a wall.

Your own finished collage downloads from the same screen where you publish or save a draft, and it goes straight to your camera roll. If it doesn’t land where you expect, saving Pinterest images to your camera roll works the same way for collages as it does for pins.

Source material is the harder problem. If you’re building outside Pinterest, in Canva or Photoshop where you control the text and spacing, you need the images out first. Screenshotting is the obvious move and the wrong one. You lose resolution, you pick up parts of the interface, and you end up cutting an object out of a picture that was already degraded.

A downloader handles it properly. The Pinterest video downloader takes a pin URL and gives you the original file back, with no watermark, no software to install and no Pinterest login. Video pins come back as MP4 at up to 1080p. For stills, the Pinterest image downloader returns JPG or PNG at full resolution, which is what makes a clean cutout possible. Either way it’s the same copy, paste, download, and that speed matters when you’re pulling twenty reference images for one composition.

Animated pins are their own case. Saving a GIF from Pinterest the ordinary way usually flattens it into a still frame, so a dedicated Pinterest GIF downloader is the only way to keep the animation. That’s the difference between a static mood board and a moving one. The same applies in reverse if you’re publishing a GIF back to Pinterest.

The copyright point above still applies. Download freely for personal reference and for your own pins, and think harder before anything commercial.

On reuse: a 2:3 collage drops into an Instagram story or a TikTok background with no cropping. A square Instagram post is a rebuild rather than a crop, because the composition won’t survive losing a third of its height. And if you’re printing, build it outside Pinterest at print size from high-resolution files. A collage made for the feed looks soft at poster size.

When Pinterest’s collage tool is not the right tool

It’s fast, free and genuinely good within its limits. The ceiling is text and precision.

	Pinterest Collages	Canva	Adobe Express	PicsArt
Best for	Quick collages from pins	Layouts with text and branding	Precise design work	Photo-heavy editing
Cutout tool	Built in	Background remover	Yes	Yes
Text control	Minimal	Strong	Strong	Moderate
Source material	Pins and uploads	Uploads and stock	Uploads and stock	Uploads and stock
Publishes to Pinterest	Directly	Via export	Via export	Via export
Cost	Free	Free tier, paid features	Free tier, paid features	Free tier, paid features

Use Pinterest’s tool when the collage is for Pinterest and needs no text. Move to Canva or Adobe Express the moment you need controlled type, brand colors or print output, then export at 1000 x 1500, upload as a standard pin and add your destination link. You lose the native cutout look. You gain full control, which for client work is usually the better trade.

There’s a middle option people forget. If what you want is several images in one pin rather than one finished image, adding multiple photos to a single Pinterest pin does that job with no design work at all. And if Pinterest isn’t the right home for what you’re making, there are other platforms built for the same kind of visual collecting.

Where to start

Update the app first, so you’re not troubleshooting a version problem you could have avoided. Make your first collage from a template rather than a blank canvas, so the composition is handled while you learn the controls. Then save it as a draft and come back to it tomorrow.

That last one is the only part of this that’s hard to undo.

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