about this site

Two operations, each built as far down as it goes: several pictures laid out on one board with every pixel of spacing accounted for, and two photographs the same size reduced to a single frame, mixed per pixel.

Why so narrow

Putting pictures together is a small idea with a long tail. A row of photographs is one line of arithmetic — margin, picture, gap, picture, margin — but the questions underneath it are not small: what happens when one picture is ten times the size of the others, whether a grid should crop or pad, where the short last row sits, how large a board a phone can actually draw. Blending has its own tail: whether a browser computes the twelve modes the way the specification says, what a layer with transparency does, how to fade one photograph into another without the edge going grey. A tool that also retouched and also resized would answer none of those. A tool that does only this can afford to print its own arithmetic on the rulers and to check the browser’s blend arithmetic against its own on every page load.

What it will not grow into

The board arranges whole pictures: side by side, stacked, in a grid, packed into columns or placed by hand on a canvas. It does not cut subjects out, it has no opacity or blend per picture, and it will not grow templates with stickers and decorations — that is a collage product, and a different job. The blender keeps its own limit: the second photograph is always the whole frame, fitted and faded but never given edges of its own. Saved projects and accounts are refused on purpose, not deferred, because both would need a server and there is none.

How it is built

It is a static site with no server behind it: a few pages of markup, a stylesheet and a canvas. There is no account, no queue and no storage, because there is nothing to store — the files you open are decoded into memory, laid out or mixed in the tab, and released when it closes. The board keeps only small working copies while you arrange, and reads each file again, one at a time, when you export. The engine that does the mixing is fetched as its own chunk after the page has already drawn, so the instrument is in the HTML before any decision has been made about how it will render.

Who made it

A small independent team that builds single-purpose picture tools for the web. The first screen belongs to the thing you came to do, with the explanation following below it.