Do You Know How to Create an Instagram Photo

Social media users across the web have created amazing photo hacks for their Google+, Facebook and Twitter profiles, and you may have even recreated some yourself. So, why not show your Instagram profile a little hack love?

Hacking your mobile or web Instagram profile comes with some challenges, since each time you post a new picture, the profile shifts and looks a little different.

 

SEE ALSO: 25 Most-Followed Users on Instagram

User @heralddayrit, who had nearly 5,000 Instagram followers at the time of this post, has perfected the art of the Instagram hack on his mobile profile. He incorporates quotes into his posts, using them to highlight images that transition seamlessly.

While photo apps like InstaBanners can split one picture into nine images for you, we wanted to take our hack to the next level and make something really special. We encourage you to do the same.

Here is our finished product:

For those of you who want to take a crack at it, we'll walk you through the process, step by step. Then, show us your creative genius in the comments below. Mashable will even feature the best hacks in a future post.

To hack your Instagram mobile profile, you'll need the following: nine different images, a photo editing service like Photoshop and patience — a lot of patience. For our hack, we chose to combine several different shots together to make one unified image, but you can also create a pattern or split one image into separate photographs.

1. A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words

We started on Pinterest, which was a great place to scroll through images until we found the right ones. By compiling the images onto one board, we could easily swap one option for another by taking a screenshot of the image we wanted to use. (Flexibility with image placement helped, too.) More often than not, an image we originally chose to use as the "mouth" of the face ended up being one of the "hair" pieces.

2. Start Strong

Once you have a solid number of pictures to work with, decide strategically where to start. It may be easier to begin in the middle and push outward, or start in the lower-left corner and work your way up and over.

3. Crop to Perfection

Open each photo individually in your photo editor. While this step may not be necessary for every collage, we found it very helpful to line up the images next to each other before we sending them to our phone. It helped ensure that the hack didn't turn out like this:

4. Up, Upload Away

Once you crop your images, email them to your phone and save them to your phone's photo library. Then upload them to Instagram in reverse order.

5. Now, It's Your Turn

Congratulations! You now have the coolest Instagram profile of all your friends. Let's see your finished collages, whether they're on your mobile profile or the web version.