how to creare a photo collage

Hi Khris,

you will need to use the File -> 'Import...' dialog to get the raster images into Inkscape.

Embedding in that dialog means that the images are saved within the SVG file, making the file bigger; linking means they will live separately on your hard drive, and when you move them, they cannot be found from the file where you imported them.

I suggest you also take a look at the tutorials in the Help menu, to find out about other functionality you might need, like writing text or making frames.

Keep in mind that, while Inkscape provides quite a large set of options to edit / change raster graphics (filters and cutting out, mainly), it is not primarily a raster graphics editor, but a vector graphics editor.
So if you want to edit the photos in a more complex way (like remove red eyes, retouche), use a raster graphics editor for this (like the Gimp, at http://gimp.org/ ).

Hope this helps,
 Regards,
  Maren