Is there a difference between the use of the word montage vs collage

The real question is why are you concerned with this? In what context. Does you wish to create one and not the other? You probably could also add the word mosaic to your conundrum.

Well, the rather embarrassingly mundane impetus for the word was the conundrum of how to describe these "things" that I recently created in order to help others clean toilet bowls.

Are those "things" (created for alt.home.repair earlier this week), duly named collages, montages, or mosaics?

No.

What you see is the USA being flushed down the toilet.

You could call them "composites".

I would say that those are a montage. They are individual photographs arranged on a background. They are not arranged to create another image from parts of each as I would expect in a collage. They are not laid out tile-like to form a pattern or image as one might expect with a mosaic construction.

To me - an former photographer - they are montages because they form a continuous whole.

If I printed each image individually and pasted them up they would be a collage. It is a continuous whole but made of obviously separate elements which could be separated into individual elements again.

If I made tiles of various sizes, shapes and colors and formed them into your image I would call it a mosaic.

That works too :)

Best choice IMO/

replying to dadiOH, Burt wrote: A collage is a group of images (such as pieces of colored paper) arranged on a background (such as a piece of drawing paper or a canvas). Once the collage is made, it stays the same. Montage is a film or movie term and is a succession of images that change over time. That's the basic difference between collage and montage... . . .