Making collages from your smartphone pictures has become a very popular activity and there's an abundance of apps for tackling the task available in the various app stores. Now it appears this trend has prompted the makers of the mobile world's most popular image sharing app, Instagram, to launch their own collage making app. After Hyperlapse, Layout is Instagram's second stand-alone app and currently only available for Apple's iOS devices. However, according to the Instagram blog an Android version should be available in the next few months. 

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Like any good collage app Layout allows you to combine two or more photos into a single image. After picking your first image from the camera roll you choose from a series of pre-defined layouts that you can add more images to. Individual photos can be dragged around within the collage, resized, flipped and mirrored. In the camera roll a Faces filter makes it easy to find pictures of people. 

There is also a Photo Booth mode that uses the iPhone front camera to capture four images in quick succession, just like in a real photo booth. They are then instantly arranged in the 2x2 passport-picture style but you get the option to swap images before saving the final result. Layout is now available as a free download in the Apple App Store