Before you begin, if you haven’t already got the Auto Collage program on you computer, then you will need to download it from here.
The next step is to decide which of your photos you would like to be included in the Collage, so create a new folder that will contain the chosen photos and then copy and paste them into that folder. This is because at this time you can’t select them directly from within Windows Live Photo Gallery but hopefully Auto Collage will become fully incorporated into the program.
Once you have all of your chosen photographs in the folder ((I have named mine My Collage pics so that I can easily find and access it from the program itself), then inside Windows Live Photo Gallery, just click on EXTRAS, and then select AUTO COLLAGE 2008. Auto Collage will then open and inside the right hand pane you will see IMAGE BROWSE, so click on the …….. tab and your photo folders will then be visible inside a pop up screen. Now just select the folder that you created previously and the chosen photos will then appear inside the Auto Collage creation screen.
Now click on the OPTIONS tab under the ACTIONS Menu on the right hand side of the creation screen. Here under the OUTPUT tab, you can choose the size of the created collage and whether or not to have it displayed in LANDSCAPE or PORTRAIT. Try the different settings on any of your creations to see how they fit best. Under the ADVANCED tab in the OUTPUT tab, you can also choose how much of the intended Collage to devote to your main photo in relation to the other included photos and in my case, I want the photo of my grandchildren to be the focus of the final Collage, so I set this to 140% for the top ranked image. You can also set just how much overlap you want between each photo to be inside the Collage.
Again, the best advice here is Experiment with the settings! You can’t break anything! So try all the different settings out until you are happy with them. Under the INPUT tab, you can display detected faces or allow for manual face detection or alternatively have this feature switched off. The other tab allows you to register the program if you have purchased it.
So now lets create a Collage! Click on the CREATE tab at the top of the ACTIONS menu, and the program will create a collage of your chosen photographs right before your eyes! Obviously it doesn’t always mix the photographs the first time in the positions that you would like, but that is no problem. Just click on CREATE again and when the program asks you if you want to continue because the previous attempt has not been saved, then just select YES and the program will then begin to create a different mix of your photographs so you can continue until the mix is completely to your liking.
Once you are quite happy with the resulting Collage, then just select SAVE, give your created collage a name and it will then be saved to your computer. Try making different collages with different settings! I usually incorporate about 8 to 10 separate photographs into my collages depending on just how much detail they contain but you really should experiment with this.
Unfortunately at the moment Auto Collage is not fully integrated inside Windows Live Photo Gallery despite being selectable from the EXTRAS tab, but I do hope that the long term intention is for this to happen, so that choosing the photos to incorporate into a collage will just mean ticking them from inside the Windows Photo Gallery screen and then clicking on Auto Collage under the EXTRAS tab for them to be automatically selected or alternatively being able to drag and drop them into the Auto Collage creation screen straight from Windows Live Photo Gallery. This would then make the program a truly awesome photo manipulation tool with lots of opportunities to create fantastic effects with your photo collection.
TG 
And remember, if I can do it anyone can!
