Layout Grove

Make Instagram Stories, seamless carousel posts and Reels from your own photographs — laid out the way you want them, exported at full resolution, with no watermark and no subscription.

The problem

If you care about your photographs, Instagram is a frustrating place to put them.

The built-in Story tools crop without asking. Multi-photo layouts give you almost no control over spacing or composition. Making a photo carousel that flows seamlessly across panels means fighting a template app full of watermarks, subscriptions and ads — and turning a set of stills into a decent-looking Reel usually means a full video editor.

I wanted one small app that does the layouts properly and then gets out of the way. So I built it.

What it does

Layout Grove takes photos and video clips from your library and turns them into ready-to-post Instagram content. There are six modes:

• Story — up to six photos and videos in clean, adjustable layouts. Control spacing, margins, corners and background colour, fine-tune every crop, and save your own templates.
• Gallery Post — slice one photo into a seamless multi-panel carousel, each panel cropped pixel-perfect so the image flows across your grid.
• Reel Slideshow — Ken Burns slideshows with adjustable timing and crossfades, exported as vertical video.
• Split Reel — two landscape strips stacked top and bottom, taking turns as the reel plays.
• Pan Reveal — a cinematic pan across one landscape photo that pulls back to reveal the full frame.
• Photo Drop — photos tumble onto the canvas one by one, stacking into a playful reel.

Everything exports at full Instagram resolution — 1080 × 1920 stories and reels, 1080 × 1350 carousel panels, high-bitrate H.264 video.

Drafts are saved per project, so you can pick any layout up where you left off. And if you curate your best shots by favouriting them, you can point the photo picker at your Favourites — or any album — so they are always one tap away.

Private by design

There is no account, no analytics and no tracking. The app makes no network connections at all — your photos are processed on your iPhone and never leave it.

Where to get it

Layout Grove is currently in App Store review. The download link will appear here as soon as it is approved.

Found a bug, or want a mode it does not have yet? Send me a note → — I read everything.