Photo Grid alternative for iPhone — a collage app with a long-screenshot core

Last updated: 22 July 2026

Photo Grid is a familiar name in grid-collage apps on iOS: pick photos, drop them into a grid or video collage, decorate, share. It's been in that lane for a long time and, for a lot of people, that lane is exactly what they want. Scrollie is built for a slightly different situation — one where a template collage isn't the whole workflow, but part of one that also includes long screenshots, screen recordings, an auto-saved Drafts inbox, a Cleanup brush that erases things, and a Device Mockup step at the end. This page isn't a checklist attacking Photo Grid. It's a look at what a grid collage app feels like when it's built inside a long-screenshot toolkit.

One editor: template collage on the left, long screenshot on the right, one shared Drafts inbox.

Why a "long-screenshot app that grew a collage" is different

Most grid-collage apps assume the source material is your camera roll. Photo Grid is squarely in that category. Scrollie's source material is often the same photos, but it's also chat threads, article scrolls, receipts, and screen recordings. Because Scrollie was designed around long screenshots first, the collage view inherits that toolkit for free — you can drop a stitched long screenshot into a cell of a photo collage, and it doesn't require a separate app.

Put another way: in Scrollie, a "collage" is not a special mode you enter and leave. It's one of the shapes a draft can take. The same Drafts inbox that holds your in-progress long screenshot also holds your in-progress collage, and the same Cleanup brush that wipes a watermark off a screenshot wipes a bystander out of a cell in your photo grid.

What Scrollie brings to a grid-collage workflow

1. Template collages for 2–12 photos, with per-cell depth

Freely arrange 2 to 12 photos with templates, ratios, borders and backgrounds. Each cell can be reframed, rotated or flipped. And each cell — this is where "depth" shows up — can carry its own doodle, text, sticker, mosaic, Cleanup brush pass, or custom watermark. Two photos swap places by dragging one cell onto another.

2. Auto-group a batch of photos into collages by trip

Point Scrollie at a batch of photos and it groups them into collages by capture time, place and content — a weekend of pictures becomes a set of already-composed collages rather than a chore. Each auto-generated collage is still fully editable per cell.

3. An auto-saved Drafts inbox

Most collage apps hand you the finished image the moment you tap Save. Scrollie also gives you the file before that moment. Every edit is auto-saved as a draft, and portrait and landscape drafts live in separate lanes — rotating the phone or importing a landscape recording doesn't overwrite a vertical collage you were assembling. You can put the phone down mid-edit and come back tomorrow.

4. A long-screenshot core underneath the collage

Take three overlapping screenshots of a chat thread, share them into Scrollie, and the app stitches them into one long image with automatic overlap detection. If a seam looks off, Fine-tune lets you drag it up or down with a magnifier. Import a screen recording and Scrollie turns the scroll into one long image; if you overscrolled and swiped back, the final image ends on the frame where you actually stopped, so the tail isn't doubled. That long image is a first-class object in the same editor where your template collage lives.

5. Cleanup brush and auto watermark removal

Collages carry along things you'd rather not include: a passerby in a beach cell, a stray badge on a UI screenshot, a repeating "sample" watermark across a document. The Cleanup brush paints over any object; the area fills back in to match the surrounding background. A one-tap tool detects tiled text watermarks and erases only the watermark strokes, preserving what's underneath. In our survey of eleven long-screenshot and collage competitors, none advertised object erasure or auto-detected tiled-watermark removal.

6. iPhone mockup and export you can build on

Wrap a screenshot in a real iPhone or iPad frame — including iPhone 17 series models and official colors — right inside the same editor as your collage. Export as JPEG, PNG, HEIC, PDF, or as per-ratio slices where each slice can be wrapped in its own frame. A one-tap-save preset in Settings lets you commit a favorite output format so the top-bar button "just does the right thing" each time.

Trying Scrollie alongside Photo Grid: a 5-minute walk-through

1. Install Scrollie from the App Store. Keep Photo Grid installed — this isn't either-or.
2. Pick 10–20 photos from a recent trip. Let Scrollie's auto-grouping split them into template collages by capture time and place.
3. Open one collage, tap a cell, and try the Cleanup brush on a bystander or a stray label. The background fills back in.
4. Close the app mid-edit. Open it again — your draft is right there, portrait or landscape recovered separately.
5. Bonus: take a scroll recording of a chat, share it in, and let Scrollie turn it into one long image. Drop that image into a cell of your collage.

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