Having problems trying to combine objects

I am making a music app for a school project. I am trying to do a horizontal line of a few items, which has a white square, image placed on top of the square and a title next to it.
I was using the flatten button to do the first few items on the left, but then for some reason it stopped working. Whenever I would select the white background, the image and the text to flatten, the image would blow up and warp, but stay within the confines of their original size. This was the case no matter if I merged the image and the box first, or the image and the text, or the text and the box, etc.
Same issue when trying to use ‘union selection’, except when I went to take a screenshot it started making all the elements disappear except one so that’s fun