Photo Grid

A native GNOME app to create print-ready photo grids and contact sheets, powered by ImageMagick.

Built with GTK 4 and libadwaita for a clean, modern Linux-native experience.

Features

• Paper sizes — 4×6, 5×7, A5, A4, A3, Letter, Legal, and square formats
• Grid layouts — Full page, 2-up, 2×2, 3×3, 4×4, 5×5, and contact sheet
• Orientation — Portrait or landscape
• DPI control — 150 (draft), 300 (print), 600 (high quality)
• Image sizing — Fit (preserve aspect ratio) or fill (crop to fit)
• Styling — Configurable border width/colour, spacing, page margin, and background colour
• Multi-page — Automatically splits images across pages when they exceed the grid
• PDF export — Combine all pages into a single PDF document
• Preview — Preview all pages at screen resolution before saving, with page navigation
• Thumbnails — See image thumbnails in the file list

Dependencies

Runtime

Package	Ubuntu / Debian	Fedora	Arch
PyGObject	python3-gi	python3-gobject	python-gobject
GTK 4	gir1.2-gtk-4.0	gtk4	gtk4
libadwaita	gir1.2-adw-1	libadwaita	libadwaita
ImageMagick	imagemagick	imagemagick	imagemagick

Build

Package	Ubuntu / Debian	Fedora	Arch
Meson	meson	meson	meson
Ninja	ninja-build	ninja-build	ninja

Install

# Install dependencies (Arch example)
sudo pacman -S python-gobject gtk4 libadwaita imagemagick meson ninja

# Build and install to ~/.local
meson setup builddir --prefix=~/.local
ninja -C builddir install

# The app appears in your GNOME app launcher, or run from terminal:
photo-grid

Uninstall

ninja -C builddir uninstall

Development

To run directly from source without installing:

python3 src/photo_grid.py

After making changes, rebuild and reinstall:

ninja -C builddir install

Project Structure

photo_grid/
├── meson.build                          # Top-level build definition
├── README.md
├── data/
│   ├── meson.build                      # Installs desktop entry + metainfo
│   ├── io.github.photogrid.desktop.in   # Desktop launcher entry
│   └── io.github.photogrid.metainfo.xml # AppStream metadata
└── src/
    ├── meson.build                      # Installs launcher + app module
    ├── photo-grid.in                    # Launcher script template
    └── photo_grid.py                    # Application source

How It Works

Photo Grid uses a two-step ImageMagick pipeline:

1. magick montage — arranges images into a grid with borders and spacing
2. magick — centres the grid onto a paper-sized canvas at the target DPI

For multi-page output, images are chunked according to the grid layout (e.g. 5 images in a 2×2 grid produces 2 pages). PDF export renders each page as a temporary PNG and combines them with ImageMagick.

License

GPL-3.0-or-later