Matt Shamely You’ve seen the collages on your Instagram news feed. Those cool photo mashups that combine images to tell a unique story. The time has come for you and your company to get in on the hip photo collage trend. So chug your PBR, don your Ray-Bans, saddle up on your fixie, and take a ride with me as I show you how to make Instagram Photo Collages work for you.

The History: Diptychs, Triptychs, and Polyptychs oh my

Combining multiple images to form a more complete whole has been around since the Roman Empire. Traditionally, a diptych consists of two flat plates connected with hinges. Panel paintings were paired in this way, which later gave rise to triptychs (3), and ultimately any number of image combinations.

This ancient form of collage provided artists with a way to tell more of a visual story. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then it only follows that two pictures are worth two thousand words. By using chronological panels, or by pairing dissimilar images, artists could show multiple sides of a story.

This same technique has been applied to photography ever since its creation. It is also available for your Instagram posts, but you must use a separate application first.

The Apps: Get Downloadin’

The beauty of Instagram is that you can import images into the application. This leaves the user with a much more customizable experience than the standard 16 Instagram photo filters.

There are many photo collage apps for both iOS and Android systems, and they all work roughly the same. These are the two most popular:

Pic Stitch: Free iOS collage application

PhotoGrid: Free Android and iOS collage application

All you have to do is upload and arrange your images into the collage template of your choosing, save the collage, and then upload that file into Instagram to apply a filter. Simple.

The Why: Hipsters Rule, Mundies Drool

Photo collages allow you and your company to say more through your Instagram. Some collage ideas include: a before and after shot, chronological images, and compare and contrasts.

If you have a set of images you like but don’t want to annoy your followers by blasting their feeds, you can instead combine them in a collage for a more interesting, less annoying, perspective.

Here are some collage examples to get the juices flowing for the inner hipster in you.

Have fun with Instagram photo collages, and show us some of your masterpieces.