Auto-group photos into collages — by capture time, place and content

Last updated: 22 July 2026

A weekend away turns into 80 photos. A full trip turns into 200. In every photo-collage app, that pile becomes a problem the moment you want a collage for each day, or each location. Hand-sorting is what always kills the plan. Scrollie's v2.0 auto-group step does that sorting for you: pick the whole batch, and it splits them into several ready-made collages by capture time, place and content, so you get one collage per day, or per stop, or per scene — not one impossible 200-photo grid.

The short answer: Pick a large batch of photos in Scrollie. It groups them by capture time, place and content into several 2–12 photo collages, one per group. As of v2.0.1 the batch save-all step lets you pick which album in Photos to save into, or create a new album on the spot. Everything runs on-device. Of eleven competitor App Store descriptions surveyed on 21 July 2026, none list this capability.

Scrollie iPhone auto-group result: a batch of trip photos split into several ready-made collages

Auto-group result: one batch of photos split into a stack of ready-made collages, one per day or per location.

The problem: 200 trip photos and no plan

Anyone who has come home from a trip and tried to make a collage has hit this. You want one collage per day, or one per location, or one per scene — a "market", a "hike", a "hotel room" — but the photos are all in one long timeline in the Camera Roll. Options today are: dump everything into a single crowded grid (unreadable), or sort them by hand into groups (the plan dies). A third option — let the app split them for you — is rare in this category. Of the eleven competitor App Store descriptions surveyed for this page, none list a comparable auto-grouping step.

How Scrollie groups a batch

The grouping combines three signals from the photos themselves:

Capture time — photos taken within a natural window (a morning, a dinner, an afternoon) tend to belong together. The time signal catches "the morning at the museum" without having to name it.
Place — photos taken at the same location cluster. This is what separates "the beach shots" from "the town square shots" even if they happened the same day.
Content — the visual scene helps distinguish a beach cluster from a food-photo cluster taken at the same beachside restaurant.

The result is a stack of proposed groups, each rendered as a live 2–12 collage in the template you chose. You can tweak from there — drop a photo from a group, move it to another, or let a group regenerate its collage in a different template.

The batch-collage flow, end to end

Pick your batch. In the collage tab, choose "auto-group" and select the photos — a day, a weekend, a whole trip.
Let Scrollie split. The signals above run and produce a stack of groups; each group becomes a ready-made 2–12 collage.
Review and tweak. Tap any group to open its collage. Swap cells by drag (v2.0.1), change the template, mask a face with mosaic, or run the Cleanup brush on a specific cell. Everything you do is remembered as a draft.
Batch save. Choose "save all". From v2.0.1 you can pick the destination album in Photos, or create a new album on the spot. A whole trip becomes one album of collages, one tap.
Come back later. The drafts remain; if you spot a bad cell tomorrow, jump back in and fix just that one collage — the rest stay untouched.

Batch save to a specific album (v2.0.1)

Auto-grouping only pays off if the last step — actually getting the collages into Photos — isn't a manual grind of 20 taps. The v2.0.1 update ties them together: after auto-group produces N collages, the "save all" button lets you specify which album in Photos they go into, or create a new album inline for that trip. The whole "trip → collages → album" flow is one path.

Why this matters — the empirical picture

Of the eleven competitor App Store descriptions we surveyed on 21 July 2026 — Picsew, Tailor, Stitch It, StitchPics, Zeta Stitch, ScrollShot, Longshot, Stitch, PicCollage, Photo Grid and Layout from Instagram — none list auto-grouping a batch into ready-made collages by trip, capture time or place. StitchPics does list template collage (so does PicCollage and Layout), but neither describes an auto-group step on top of it. Based on their published App Store descriptions, Scrollie's auto-group appears to be unique to Scrollie.

Two things to be honest about: (1) we're comparing published App Store descriptions, not exhaustively probing every app's UI, so a competitor may hide a similar feature we didn't find; (2) auto-grouping is a heuristic — it proposes groups, and the user still has the last call. Scrollie is opinionated about starting from a reasonable split; you always keep the tweak step.

What's free vs Pro

Basic collage building is free. Auto-group into collages is a Pro feature; Pro comes with a free trial, then a monthly or annual subscription or a one-time lifetime purchase, with prices shown in the app before you commit. Everything runs on-device — your photos and their metadata never leave the phone.

Honest scope: auto-grouping works best when the photos have real capture time and place metadata (i.e. taken on-device with Location Services on for the Camera). If you've stripped metadata out, or the photos were saved from someone else's messages, the grouping falls back to content only and gets less precise. In that case, use the manual template picker and pick photos yourself — same 2–12 templates, same per-cell editor, just no auto-split.

Frequently asked questions

What does auto-group photos into collages actually do?

Pick a large batch of photos in Scrollie — say a whole trip. Instead of throwing them all into one crowded collage, Scrollie splits the batch into groups by capture time, place and content, then generates a ready-made 2–12 photo collage for each group. You end up with several collages side by side, one per day or per location, without hand-sorting.

How does Scrollie decide which photos belong together?

Three signals combine: capture time from the photo's timestamp (photos taken close together tend to be from the same moment), place from the location the photo was taken in (photos from the same spot tend to belong together), and visual content (a beach cluster is different from a museum cluster). The groups it proposes are a starting point you can tweak — remove a photo, move it to another group, then let the collages regenerate.

Is Scrollie really the only one doing this?

Can I save the whole batch of collages to a specific album?

Yes. From v2.0.1 the batch save-all step lets you pick which album in Photos to save into, or create a new album on the spot. That turns a whole trip's worth of photos into one album of collages in one tap — no per-collage save loop.

Is Scrollie free? And does the grouping happen on-device?

Core features are free; Pro features come with a free trial, then a monthly or annual subscription or a one-time lifetime purchase. All the grouping, collage generation and export happen on the device — your photos are never uploaded to a server.

A whole trip, sorted into collages, in one tap.

Core features free. Pro comes with a free trial, then a subscription or a one-time lifetime purchase.

Download Free on the App Store

iPhone & iPad · iOS 16 or later · 100% on-device