Collage automating/making software

Anyone know of a simple yet flexible software to create simple collages like this?

http://www.google.com …d=1t:429,r:23,s​:111,i:165

Of course, you can make them with photoshop but that is too time consuming... It would be good if it came with some templates from which I can fit in the photographs by resizing/cropping them.

THanks

My niece is into this scrapbooking thing and she uses a program called Picture Collage Maker 3. I had a look at it at her place and it seems pretty rudimentary but it does the job. If one Googles "Collage Making Software" you get several different promising results but I don't have any experience with them. I did read a little and personally I will stick with Photoshop. Most of these are relatively small programs and do have a free trial period. If you are stuck on an external application then I would simply download some of them and give them a go. Only you can gauge if an application is going to do it for you.

The other option might be to buy the templates from one of the many places on the net that are offering them. I attended a Photoshop seminar a couple of years ago and Graphic Authority was giving away some of their templates and I ended up buying some of the others that they had there that day as the price was drastically reduced. There is no doubt in my mind that they make a great product and they are easy to use. For the ones that I use alot I have made the image layers into smart layers and then you can right click and replace the existing image with any on your system. It works pretty good and it is fast. If one takes the time to create styles for the effects you want on the layers in one of these images then it is as simple as one click on future operations. They don't come cheap but you get alot of templates for your money. These are not the only guys doing this and I offer them up only as an example.

I have seen people offering actions to do this as well. Places to look for these would be Panos FX, Action Central and 1 Click Actions which all have a variety of paid and free actions which you could browse through to see if they meet your needs. Another place would be Adobe Exchange where users offer up and trade actions, scripts and plug-ins.

I personally like the flexibility of Photoshop but it is up to each user to determine if they like this process.