Making a photo mosaic from lots of small images

June 15, 2004 2:53 AM

Anyone have any experience creating a photo mosaic from lots of other small images that looks from a distance like another? Wondering if there's any good PC software (or Photoshop plugins)....
posted by brettski to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

I have no experience with such a software, but you will find some programs here, some of them are free. You'll find a plugin for GIMP here. I have no time to try some of those tools right now (hard day at the office...) but I will report my results later on.
posted by tcp at 5:13 AM on June 15, 2004

I tried Foto Mosaik, it's free and easy to handle. I grabbed a stock images CD and loaded 6000 thumbnails into Foto Mosaik's database which took only a minute. The calculation of the target image took about 3 minutes.

Here are my results:

cnn.jpg, 6000 tiles, tile size 8px, 0% overlay

brills.jpg, 3000 tiles, tile size 20px, 50% overlay

As you can see the softare does a pretty good job as long as you enable overlay which means that the original image is blended over the tiles.
posted by tcp at 6:02 AM on June 15, 2004

As you can see the softare does a pretty good job as long as you enable overlay which means that the original image is blended over the tiles.

Isn't that cheating?
posted by jpoulos at 6:51 AM on June 15, 2004

The blending is serious cheating! I wrote one of these programs back in the day. It took 100% of a silicon graphics machine for hours, sometimes days (I had a database of hundreds of thousands of pictures).

Overlay will make a picture that look more like your original, but, less like a photomosaic, imho.
posted by RustyBrooks at 6:55 AM on June 15, 2004

uhm...

yes it is
posted by tcp at 6:56 AM on June 15, 2004

i don't think blending should be necessary, but the key is to have a few thousand source images to work with. i used a free osx program to do this one of my son, and i didn't use the highest quality/density settings: http://chrisboy.com/oly/mosaic.html -- it's based on a close-up of this: http://chrisboy.com/oly/spring2002/source/33.html
it looks great printed out at a photo-lab at 4x6. (unfortuantely i can't find the program... but you wanted a PC one anyway....) (FYI, the one i used had the option to include images from keyword searches at google image search, right from within the program. then you can make a pic of satan out of nothing but clowns, or whatever you find amusing/appropriate. gotta find that program again.)
posted by chr1sb0y at 9:07 AM on June 15, 2004

of course... here it is, just a moment too late: http://homepage.mac.com/knarf/MacOSaiX/

here's a list of windows mosaic software that i compiled for a coworker last year. some of these links may be dud by now.

this one costs 29 dollars - http://www.photomosaicmaker.com/epmm/intro.htm

this one has a free version and a pay version - but the free version seems good - http://www.2gether1.net/index.html

this one is shareware: http://alhena-design.com/centarsia/

here's a list of other programs for mosaics: http://www.excite.co.uk/directory/Computers/Software/Graphics/Mosaic_Creation
posted by chr1sb0y at 9:16 AM on June 15, 2004

Mazaika is worth a try...

Small fee for upgrade to full version... but this guy supports his program like you wouldn't believe. I've been very pleased.
posted by cadastral at 9:43 AM on June 15, 2004