About the joiner

MergePicture does one thing: it puts pictures next to each other and gives you back one picture. That is the whole product, and keeping it that small is a decision rather than a limitation.

Why one operation

Most tools that will join two pictures will also crop them, filter them, add text to them and hunt for a file size, and each of those features is one more thing between you and the join. The trade in the other direction is that a tool doing one operation can afford to answer the awkward questions properly — what happens when the heights don’t match, what happens to a colour profile at a seam, what happens when the result is taller than a browser will draw. Those are the questions that make a join look wrong, and they are all in step three.

What it deliberately does not do

It does not mix two frames into each other so both show through. It does not place a small element on top of a photograph. It does not put a repeated protective mark across a batch, or fill a chosen template with photos, or cut a picture into pieces, or reduce a file to a stated number of kilobytes. Every one of those is a real job and none of them is this one — pictures here touch and never cover each other. When a job clearly belongs somewhere else we say so plainly rather than building a thin version of it.

How it is built

It is a static site with no server behind it. Pictures are read by your own browser, arranged on a canvas by your own browser, and turned into a file by your own browser. There is no upload step because there is nothing to upload to: no account, no queue, no storage. The measuring work behind the long-screenshot mode runs in a background thread so the wizard stays responsive while it thinks, and the code that does it is fetched only when you choose that mode.

The consequence, which is worth stating: everything is limited by the device in front of you. A phone with little memory will refuse a hundred large pictures where a desktop would not. We would rather tell you that in a sentence than hand you a truncated file.

Who makes it

It is built and maintained by the small team behind PictureEditor.com, which is credited in plain text at the foot of every page — as text rather than as a link, because thirty-odd sibling sites all pointing at one address would be a link network whatever we meant by it. The plan is for it to pay for itself with advertising placed below the reading material and never inside the tool, but that is a plan and not yet a fact: nothing is being served here while the domain sits pending Google’s approval, so at the moment this page costs us money and earns none. There is no paid tier either way, because there is nothing here worth charging for.

Getting in touch

If a join comes out wrong, the useful thing to send is the sizes of the pictures that went in, which of the four sizing policies was set, and what you expected instead. Write to hello@mergepicture.com. Please don’t attach the pictures themselves — we would rather not have them, which is rather the point of the whole thing.