If a picture is worth a thousand words, then multiple pictures smushed together into the same square-cropped Instagram post must be like a freaking novel. Or a short story at least. The new Layout app from Instagram lets you easily create that sort of photo collage from your gallery, or take new snapshots on the spot. It's aimed at Instagram users, but you can do whatever you want with the images.

The app displays photos already on your device arranged in three ways—recent, faces (as detected by the app), and the full gallery list. You can choose up to nine photos to arrange into various layouts. Each individual picture can be zoomed, moved, and flipped around. You can also drag and drop any of the photos in the collage to swap places with another one. The layouts can be tweaked by using the re-sizing bars to change the proportions of each frame too.

Layout's photo booth feature for taking new pictures is really serious about the photo booth analog. It's front-facing camera only and it can take up to four shots in quick succession. You can just take the photos in other apps if you don't want to do the whole selfie thing. When you're done, layout helpfully offers you the option of sharing on Facebook or Instagram, then there's another button for all those other services used by filthy peasants.