Designing Spreads

What's a Spread?

A spread is a pair of facing pages in your album. The editor lets you design each spread individually, or work across the full album using the spread strip.

Adding Photos to a Spread

1. Select photos from the sidebar panel
2. Drag them onto the spread canvas
3. The layout engine automatically positions and sizes them

Drop one photo for a full-bleed hero shot. Drop six for a multi-photo collage. The engine adapts to whatever you throw at it.

The Smart Layout Engine

The layout engine is the core of Spreadu. When you drop photos onto a spread, it:

• Reads your photos. Orientation, aspect ratio, visual weight.
• Builds a layout. Balanced, varied, and specific to those exact images.
• Respects your frame. No cropping unless you choose it. Your composition stays intact.
• Handles any count. 2 photos or 12. Mixed orientations. Panoramics next to portraits. It figures it out.

The layout engine computes in under 5 milliseconds. You'll see results before you finish lifting your finger off the mouse.

Manual Adjustments

After auto-layout, fine-tune anything:

• Move photos by dragging them to a new position
• Resize by dragging edges or corners of a photo zone
• Zoom into a photo by scrolling while hovering over it
• Pan within a photo by holding Space and dragging
• Rotate using the rotation slider in the edit overlay

The engine gives you a strong first draft. You decide how much to polish.

Layout Modes

Spreadu supports two layout modes:

• Full Spread. Photos flow across both pages as one continuous design. Great for most albums.
• Per Page (Layflat). Each page is independent. Ideal for layflat albums where the binding is visible.

Switch between modes in the spread settings.

Spread Navigation

• Spread strip at the bottom shows thumbnails of all spreads
• Click any thumbnail to jump to it
• Arrow keys move to the next or previous spread
• Add spreads with the + button in the strip