VSCO’s new Montage tool lets you piece together content to create collage-style videos

With apps like TikTok and Byte offering people creative ways to piece together short videos, it’s no secret the format is becoming more popular by the minute. That’s why VSCO, the photo-editing app, has officially launched its latest multimedia tool called Montage.

With Montage, you can use your own content to stitch together different scenes for a collage-like video. To add to each scene, you can also tack on or layer in different shapes, adjust the opacity of colors, flip or mirror images, and more.

Let’s just say if you end up with this crazy, patchwork style video that makes you slightly dizzy, then you’re on the right track. 

The new feature (available on Android and iOS) comes only a few weeks after the company announced the ability to post videos directly to VSCO. While subscribers were previously able to edit video directly in the app, they weren’t able to upload the content directly to the platform until recently.

As with video publishing, Montage is only available to those who have a VSCO membership which costs $20 per year. Otherwise, you can download and use it for free, but you’ll only have access to a limited number of filters and editing tools.

According to Clarissa Negrete, Senior Product Manager Creative Tools at VSCO, the company created Montage from patterns they noticed were already existent on the app.

“We saw a trend of creators [on VSCO] posting these collages and shapes off platform but bringing it to VSCO, which lead us to be really thoughtful on how we can serve them on our app,” Negrete told Mashable.

Since its users couldn’t find certain tools to use on VSCO itself, they sourced out other ways to inject some creativity into their pieces before uploading them to the app.

“We were really surprised to find that it was a mix of a wide array of tools, from [Adobe] Photoshop Lightroom to Markup on your iPhone to Google Docs. Just like hacking together things to make shapes or really small details that they couldn’t do in one place,” Negrete said.

Teenagers these days, huh? They’re clever.

Montage lives within the Studio tab on the app. Once you tap to start one, you’re prompted to select your aspect ratio: 9:16, 1:1, or 16:9—portrait, square, or landscape, respectively. 

You’re then brought to a blank canvas where you can add videos or images. Using the Media tab beneath it, you’re able to choose between photos in your camera roll or ones you’ve already uploaded to VSCO beforehand.

As mentioned before, you can add different shapes (triangles, circles, and squares), increase or decrease opacity, stack content on top of one another, copy and paste, as well as mirror or flip images and videos.

While you can add as many scenes to your Montage as you’d like, each scene can only be up to a minute long. Using the duration tool, you’re able to adjust how long or short you want each scene to be.

When you’re done, you can export it to your camera roll to then share on other social media platforms and you can also upload it to the VSCO app itself.

I had the chance to try out a beta version of Montage before it launched. To give you an example of how it works, above is a screen recording of how I pieced together my very first one.

While I’m not the type to normally use artistic/creative apps like this, I realized it was a great way to showcase unused photos from my weekend excursion testing out the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra.

I took tons of shots with it, but I ultimately wasn’t able to include all of them in my review. So, when presented with the opportunity to try Montage, those photos were the first thing that came to mind.

Please enjoy my masterpiece below. I worked very hard on it. 

I have to say though, the feature is highly addicting. I’m pretty sure I spent a solid twenty minutes on one scene because I needed to get it just right.

You’ve been warned.