Create a photo collage from the Linux command line

Here's how I use ImageMagick to make photo grids for my social media posts.

ImageMagick is the "Swiss Army knife" of manipulating images on the command line. While you could use a desktop graphics program like GIMP or GLIMPSE to adjust or combine photos and graphics, sometimes it's just easier to use one of the almost dozen tools from ImageMagick.

For example, I frequently find myself creating image montages to share on social media. Let's say I wanted to share a montage or "image grid" of several screenshots. To do that, I use the ImageMagick montage command.

ImageMagick is a full suite of tools, and the one I use here is the montage command. The general syntax of the montage command looks like this:

montage {input} {actions} {output}

In my case, my screenshots are already the same size: 320x240 pixels. To create a montage of six of these images, in a grid that's two screenshots wide by three tall, I can use this command:

$ montage acronia.png \
ascii-table.png \
music.png \
programming-chess.png \
petra.png \
amb.png \
-tile 2x3 -geometry +1+1 \ 
screenshot-montage.png

This creates an image that's composed of the six screenshots, with a 1-pixel border around each. Doing the math, that's 644 pixels wide and 726 pixels high.

Note the order of the images: ImageMagick montage arranges the images from left-to-right and top-to-bottom.

Image by:

_{Photograph by Jim Hall, CC BY-SA 4.0}

In my example, the first row of images shows the open source 2D shooter Acronia and an ASCII programming example, the middle row is an open source music player and a chess programming example, and the third row shows the open source game Post Apocalyptic Petra and the FreeDOS AMB Help reader.