Photo toy
About this editor
ColorOverlay is a browser-based photo editor for turning one or more still images into collages, animated textures, color overlays, and short looping compositions. Choose an aspect ratio, add photos from your device, adjust a play, and stack effects until the frame feels right. The workspace is designed for quick visual experiments without sending the source photos to a server.
Published by the ColorOverlay Team. Updated August 30, 2026.
Start by choosing a canvas ratio that matches the destination: square for profile grids, portrait for stories, or landscape for a presentation and a web page. Add up to six local photos, choose a play such as Collage, Pop Press, Online Lines, Jump Cut, Zine, Word Hunt, bAd Camera, Pixel, Shapes, or Color Overlay, then tune its controls in the right panel. Effects are rendered in stack order, so moving a layer changes the final composition.
The ten effect families cover common photo-to-motion patterns: grid and split layouts for collages, repeating marks and lines for texture, hard cuts for rhythm, editorial blocks for zine pages, words for kinetic type, and color or pixel treatments for atmosphere. Every effect uses a saved seed, which makes a recipe reproducible when you return to it with another image.
Image files are decoded in your browser and represented as temporary Blob URLs. The editor does not upload source photos, request camera permission, or publish a gallery. Refreshing the page clears imported photos; local recipe storage keeps only settings, colors, layout choices, and deterministic seeds.
Render a still frame as PNG when transparency matters or WebP when a smaller file is useful. Chromium browsers can also record a two-, four-, or six-second WebM loop through the browser MediaRecorder API. Output size is selected before export, and the final render uses the same canvas pipeline as the live preview.
ColorOverlay is built on documented web platform capabilities. These references explain the browser APIs used for drawing, local file input, and optional video recording.
“The Canvas API provides a means for drawing graphics via JavaScript.”