ImageChef is a free app that lets you create fun collages and add text and stickers to your photos, ideal for sharing on social networks and chat apps.

Personalize templates with photos and text

When you open the app, you can scroll through three galleries of image templates. Featured, Recent and All. These are broken into loose categories, but in essence there are three main types. Some templates allow you to add an image and custom text, some just an image, and others just text. Whatever template you choose, you'll be able to add some stickers to it during the edit process.

Once you've chosen a template, you can tap the image to either take a new photo or add one from your device. You can resize and zoom the photos you choose. With text, simply tap it to edit. In the templates you can't alter font or text color - but if you choose to add additional text you can do both. What you can't do is edit the templates themselves, and in the free version your completed images have an ImageChef watermark.

A premium version of ImageChef, which you can buy in-app for $0.99, removes ad banners, the watermarks, and allows you to create 'Visual Poetry Videos'.

Simple but limited

ImageChef is easy to use, but it's a very limited app. There could be greater options to edit the templates, and some of them are not excellently designed. This can mean getting a photo to look right, or making the correct text appear, feels like a bit of a lottery. The range of stickers you can add to your photos is pretty small, too. They are easy to add, resize and rotate on your photos, but there simply aren't enough of them.

The selection of templates available in ImageChef is also a bit limited. Its library is not exactly stylish - the app allows you to create pretty cheesy images. This is not a cool image editor; it's a fun, down to earth app. If you can accept that, you might enjoy ImageChef.

Personalized but unoriginal images

If you like to share images of text written in the sand, or of you and your loved ones superimposed on a fake newspaper cover, ImageChef could be for you. Just don't expect anything too stylish.