Fill a ready-made magazine layout with your own photos

You can now take a finished magazine page, one our editors have already drawn, and make it yours: your photographs in its frames, your words on its lines, downloaded as a PDF in a few minutes. Atlas Studio, which arrived in version 1.1.0, holds over two hundred of these layouts, from single-page magazines to complete issues that run from cover to colophon. You do not need an account to fill one or to download it, and your photographs stay in your browser unless you choose to save a link.

This is the quickest way to a magazine layout with your own photos when you already know the look you want and would rather not build it page by page.

Four shelves, one button

Open Atlas Studio and you will see the layouts arranged on four shelves, with a row of buttons at the top to show one at a time:

• One-page magazines. A whole story on a single sheet, in a dozen moods: minimal, cinematic, zine, anime, the long letter and the classic cover.
• Magazine pages. The leaves an issue is built from: covers, contents, openers, photo plates, pull quotes and the back of the book.
• New ideas. Layouts still on the drawing board, among them a contact sheet, a postcard and a double-page spread.
• Complete issues. Whole ten-page issues, each in a house style of its own, from Swiss and Gazette to Riviera, Garden and Noir, plus a twelve-page City Edition for a week of news in one city.

Press any page to see it as large as your screen allows. The arrow keys, or the arrows either side, turn to the next and previous layouts, so you can leaf through a shelf the way you would leaf through a stack of magazines. When one is right, press Use this layout. On a complete issue there is a second button, Use the whole issue, which opens every page of it at once.

How to make a page yours

The page opens in the fill-in editor, with the layout on one side and a short sidebar on the other.

1. Press Add your photos and choose as many as you like. They fill the layout's pictures in the order you picked them, so choose them in the order you want them read.
2. Change any one picture. Under Pictures in this layout, every frame on the page has a numbered thumbnail; the ones still showing the sample photograph are greyed out. Choose one, then press any of your photos under Your photos to put it there, or press New photo for picture and its number to bring in a different file.
3. Move the photo in its frame. Press and drag any picture on the page to choose which part of the photograph shows. Pinch, or use the Zoom slider in the sidebar, to enlarge it, up to four times. If you change your mind, Reset position and zoom puts it back. On a phone, the first tap on a picture only chooses it, so scrolling down the page never moves a photo by accident.
4. Rewrite the words. Tap any heading, caption or paragraph and type over it. The Type panel opens beside it with the font, size, weight, bold, italic, capitals, alignment, letter spacing, line height, colour and highlight. As designed returns a block to the editor's original setting.
5. Delete what you don't need. A layout with six frames and five good photographs does not have to show a sample in the sixth: press Delete picture and its number, or Delete this box in the Type panel for words. The box disappears and the page around it stays exactly where it was. Undo and Bring all back are there if you want it again.
6. Take it away. Download PDF makes the file. A single page also offers PNG, a picture you can send on WhatsApp or post as it is.

Why it is built this way

Your photographs stay with you. The photos you add are held in your browser's memory, not uploaded, and the PDF and the PNG are drawn inside your browser too. The sidebar says it plainly: nothing is uploaded unless you save. That is the same promise the rest of Atlas makes, and the Studio keeps it for downloads with no account at all.

The page is the design, not an approximation of it. Every layout is a finished page, drawn in its own sealed frame on your screen, and the download is made from that same drawn page. What you see while you work is what prints. The files print at the magazine's own sheet size, and it is the same press that draws pages on the desk and in Editor in Chief.

Deleting a box never wrecks the layout. When you remove a picture or a block of words, Atlas hides it rather than taking it out, so nothing slides up to fill the space and the design's balance holds. It also takes the white mount round a polaroid, or the coloured pill round a label, so you are not left with an empty frame.

A photograph shown twice moves as one. Some designs use a picture twice on purpose: the two halves of a double-page spread, or a small copy on the contents page. Drag the photograph on one half of a spread and the other half follows, because it is one photograph cut across two pages. The contents thumbnail is a different size, so it keeps its own crop.

Nothing to install, and no account to try it. The Studio runs in the browser on a phone or a laptop. Downloads need no sign-in and use none of your plan's allowances.

Who it is for

The Studio suits the moments when you have the photographs and a few lines, and you want something that looks finished tonight:

• A wedding, function by function. A complete issue gives the mehendi, the haldi, the sangeet, the pheras and the reception a page each, with the cover for the two of you.
• Diwali at home. A one-page magazine in the cinematic or classic mood holds the rangoli, the diyas on the balcony and the family photo on the stairs, as a single sheet to print for the grandparents.
• A first birthday. A year of photographs across a complete issue, and a pull quote page for what someone said on the day.
• A school annual day. A cover, a contents page and photo plates from the Magazine pages shelf make a short souvenir for a class or a house.
• A trip. A complete issue in the Riviera or Gazette style gives each day of the trip a page of its own.
• Your neighbourhood's week. The City Edition is set out like a city weekly, with briefs, a week of dates and a reader's page, for a residents' association or a family newsletter.

If you would rather pour a long story through pages that are measured to fit (we wrote about how that measuring works), the desk at /create does that. The Studio is the other way round: the design is fixed and your words go into the room it leaves.

What to know before you start

• Words are cut where the design ends them. The Studio does not measure and reflow text the way the desk does, so a caption much longer than the sample will be cut off at the edge of its box. Write to the space, or shrink the type in the Type panel.
• Save & share needs an account. It gives you a link to send, and the pages are sealed in your browser before they leave it, with the key in the link itself. Signing in takes you to Google and back; the Studio parks your photos, your crops and your words first and reopens the save dialog when you return. On the free Wanderer plan a saved link lasts up to 30 days; keeping one forever comes with Traveller and Cartographer.
• The one spread cannot be saved as a link. Saved issues are read as upright pages, so the double-page spread offers a PDF download but not Save & share.
• PNG is for single pages. A whole issue downloads as one PDF.

Try it this week

Pick the ten photographs from your last family occasion that you would put on a wall. Open Atlas Studio, go to Complete issues, and press Use the whole issue on whichever house style suits them. Add the photos, drag each into place, write one line per page, and download the PDF. It is a quarter of an hour, and you will have a magazine of a day you would otherwise have left in your camera roll.