Shape Collage is one of those programs that makes you go: “Cool!”  I can’t believe I hadn’t heard of this program before I received an email today from the Shape Collage creator.

You can watch the above video or read Vincent’s explanation of the program below.

Shape Collage (www.shapecollage.com) is an automatic photo collage maker that creates collages in different shapes in just a couple of seconds.

Shape Collage can take hundreds of photos and, using a patent pending algorithm, automatically arrange them in a collage in any user-defined shape, such as a rectangle, heart, word, or logo. These collage images can be used in any digital setting, such as on blogs or as desktop wallpapers, or be printed for posters and scrapbook uses.

The Shape Collage desktop software makes creating collages effortless, but at the same time it is a very powerful program, as it has a number of advanced features, such as using custom shapes and being able to save collage images in Adobe Photoshop PSD file format with each photo in its own layer. The desktop software is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, and has been downloaded over 600,000 times since February 2009.

Shape Collage Online (www.shapecollage.com/online) is a web application that uses the Shape Collage technology to create unique collages using photos on the web. These collages also serve as an image browsing tool because the individual photos in the online collages can be enlarged by clicking on them.

Shape Collage Inc. was founded in 2009 by Vincent Cheung, who did his PhD in Computer Engineering and is an alumni of Google and Microsoft Research, to make it easy to share, display, organize, and browse large collections of digital media in creative ways.