Instagram's latest standalone app is taking on the photo collage.

With Layout, Instagram has taken a similar approach to collages as Hyperlapse did for time lapse videos: a simple interface with with rich features that will appeal to casual and power users alike.

If you take a lot of photos — as many collage-makers do — quickly finding the ones you want can be a challenge. Instagram has included three different tabs to quickly sort your images: all, recents and faces. Faces is able to detect people in images and only displays photos that have people in them. When you add one of these to a collage, the app does another neat trick: it automatically centers the image based on the location of the face. Of course, you can always manually adjust the position of the image within the collage, but it's a handy feature to have this automated.

Alternatively, you can use the "photo booth" function to take a series of rapid-fire selfies (up to four) to automatically populate your collage. This feature only work's with your iPhone's front-facing camera so you can't use flash or set the time between shots, but it could be useful for spontaneous photo opps (the individual photos taken within the app are also automatically saved to your camera roll). 

Once you have selected the photos and the collage style, the app automatically arranges the photos for you. This highlights one of the best parts of this app's user experience: how simple it is tweak collages. You can rearrange the photos by dragging them around to different positions in the grid, resize the photos or make last-minute replacements with the “replace" tool.

You can also make more artistic adjustments by using the flip and mirror tools. The flip function rotates the photo upside down and the mirror function creates a reflection of the image. These sound like pretty basic image editing features (they are), but when you use them in a collage it opens up some pretty creative possibilities. For example, the collage below is actually two different images used nine times. I mirrored the photos in the far-left column to make it look like one connected landscape image, which gives the photos a look I couldn't otherwise achieve.

When you've finished a collage, you can share it to Instagram or Facebook, and if you share the collage directly to Instagram, you can still add a filter or make other adjustments within that app. Notably, the app emphasizes sharing with other apps outside of Facebook's ecosystem and you also have the ability to share it with several other apps, including Snapchat, Tumblr, Do Camera and Slack.  

To find the apps you can share to, tap "more," scroll all the way to the right and select "more" to switch on additional sharing extensions. Twitter is, predictably, absent from this list, but you can work around this by saving the collage to your camera roll (which happens automatically when you save a collage) and sharing it directly through the Twitter app.

Whether Instagram's backing will be enough to get their wide user base to adopt the collage app remains to be seen. Other apps, like PicFrame and Pic Stitch, beat Instagram to launch by years and already have a large number of users. But Instagram seems to have struck the right balance of simplicity and features to appeal to its base so it could eventually draw some of those users away from the competition.

The free app is iPhone only for now, though the company says an Android version is coming in the next few months.