How-To: Make your own photo mosaics
posted October 19th 2004 11:30AM
This week's How-To shows how to take just about any ordinary image you've taken with your digital camera (or from the web) and make a photo mosaic. A photo mosaic is one large image made out of hundreds and thousands of tiny images from your personal stash, from google images or even frames from a movie. There are a few applications that do this for free, on Macs / PCs, and we'll show you where to get them and how to use them.
Getting starting...
Awhile back we saw a post on "The Future of Television,"
which had a picture of Bill Gates made out of all the company logos Microsoft bought up, sued, or was sued by over
the years.
While we thought the image was kinda amusing, along with the ones of Dick Cheney made of
oil, what was more interesting to us was how they did it. Since it didn't tell us, we started looking around.
Once we found a few free tools and made our own, we figured a lot of other people might want to make their own posters,
giftwrapping paper, and more. Once you make these you can go to just about any print shop and have them run off a high
quality print at almost any size.
We also realize there might be other and better applications that can accomplish the same thing we've got here, so
please feel free to post them up in the comments.
Ingredients for this How-To
- PC and/or Mac
- lots of images
- PC application Andrea Mosaic
- Mac application MacOSaiX
PC
Download and install Andrea Mosaic.
Make sure to have a folder full of images, at least 100 or so, somewhere on your hard drive (My Documents / My Photos,
etc.). The images should all be in the same folder, but can have sub-folders within the main folder. These are the
images you'll use to build the photo mosaic. You may need more or less than 100 images for your mosaic, but after you
build one you can always add or remove images to get the best results.
Start the application Start > AndreaMosaic.
In Step 1. Click Find Tiles, this is where we will locate the images on our hard drive. Click "Create Collection" and browse to the folder with the images.
We had a folder on our desktop called "puppy" with about 150 images of our puppy. Type in the name of your collection in the file name area and click Save.
Click "Load Collection," and choose the collection your just created. Once loaded you will see a dialog with the total number of images and how long it took to load them.
There are other options such as updating collections, making the photos black and white (while keeping the final image color) as well as extracting frames from a movie to make a mosaic, which you can explore once you get the hang of making mosaics.
For now, click close.
Next up, in Step 2 there are seven default values: final size, number of tiles, distance between duplicates,
modifications, algorithm, movie parameters, and lines around each image. For our sample, we used the default settings
and it worked out pretty well. Feel free to change these parameters to get better or different results.
Click "Create the Mosaic" to, you know, create the mosaic. A new window will appear along with a status of image processing. You'll also see a preview when the processing is completed, you can close it and modify the parameters or just use your image.
The image will appear on the desktop or whatever location your original image is located.
Here is our before and after.
Before. Click here for full sized
image (warning big file).
After. Click here for full sized
image (warning big file).
To get the full effect of these, it's usually best to print them out and stand back, or squint your eyes to see the
main image and stand close to see the individual ones.
Movies
Andrea Mosaic also offers AVI to Mosaic (or movie to mosaic) so if you have any movies in the AVI format (many digital
cameras store movies as AVI as well as many movies found on the web are usually AVI).
Other applications
On the PC, here are a couple more free apps we've seen, but haven't tried yet.
Centarsia.
Rick and Steve's Photomosaic Program.
Mac
Download and install MacOSaiX.
For the Mac walkthrough we're not going to use a collection of images like our first example, although with this
application, MacOSaiX you can, of course. Instead, we're going to use Google image search as our image source(s). This
is a really cool feature so we're just going to show this part (otherwise making regular mosaics is really simple).
It's also really handy to use Google image search as your source because you're likely not to have hundreds of images
on one specific subject, but google does.
Start "MacOSaiX" and select "New" in the File menu (File > New).
In the menu area click "Choose" image to make mosaic from. For this example, we're going to use a picture of Phillip
Torrone (me) who rarely smiles.
In the "Shape of tiles" pull down list you have a few options, rectangles, Puzzle Pieces and Hexagon. We're going to
stick with rectangle.
The default number or tiles down and across are 20 each, we're going to boost those up 25 and 25, that way we get more
images and a better mosaic for a total of 625 images.
Under Image Sources, the default is your Picture folder, we're going to select that and remove it and then add the
google images.
Click "Add source" and choose "Google Term" for this example, we typed in "robot" we're not sure what's going to
happen, but here it goes.
After that click "Go!", MacOSaiX will now go out and grab 625 images from google to make the final mosaic.
As it finds the images, you'll see them fill in on the left pane. At any time you can zoom or pause the process to
see what's going on and what images it's grabbing.
When it's finished (it will say "idle") you can save the image (File > Export Image). If you're not happy with the
quality, try increasing or decreasing the number of rectangles and/or trying another google search term.
Before. Click here for full sized image (warning, big file).
After. Click here for full sized image
(warning, big file).
Same drill as before; to get the full effect of these, it's usually best to print them out and stand back, or squint
your eyes to see the main image and stand close to see the individual ones.
As a bonus tip for the advanced user, you can also open up PhotoShop or GiMP and overlay the original over the
mosaic and alpha it out a bit to make the image pop a some more. Have at it and experiment!
Mosaics from Movies...
If you want to take the beta version for a spin, its newest feature offers the ability to pull images from QuickTime
movies, so in theory you could make an image like this, every
second of Star Wars. Just set the image to something blank (or one of the characters for added geek).
Phillip Torrone can be reached via his personal site: http://www.flashenabled.com
Hey Phil, love the article. I remeber when you used to run bookofseg.com. I'm in a high school and in a computer art class, this was extremly helpful.
I was looking for idea for christmas presents which didn't cost much money - with this I can give some unique pictures to my family for Christmas.
Not Mosaic, but interesting...
http://brendandawes.com/sketches/redux/index.html
using
http://processing.org/
That doggy is so cute!
I came across this patent when I was trying out photomosaics a couple of years ago..
http://www.photomosaic.com/rt/patent-index.html
Great apps. but the main setback to these freeware is they use fuzzy-logic to arrange the photo clips on main photo by mapping the brightness & contrast of the main image.
This definetly is a quik-fix job... but precisely arranging the photo clips to create a unique mosiac needs human brain(ultimate logic).
Check out this plug-in:
http://registry.gimp.org/plugin?id=408
damn, now people know how i made the mosaic of joi ito:
http://www.vanschip.com/archives/2004/09/jois_web.html
thanks for sharing, i was obviously to lazy to do so!
Cute pup, I have two just like him/her.
See mosaic software comparison
http://www.aolej.com/mosaic/compare.htm
I don't think there exist a real patent problem, especially for personal use. At my forum there are some post's about this issue.
http://andreaplanet.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=64
Nice Work Phillip :)
Hi Phil ,
just another big thanx from my corner of the globe for all your efforts. I've been a follower of fashions since your earlier days and always enjoy(ed) your site, hints and tips.
Hope your creativity never fades and be your brain blessed for the years to come.
Cheers, Hal
PT - you kick a33 - this rocks!
Hello,
I can't make it not to flip my photos, Is this possible?
These are, I believe, the first modern Photo Mosaics:
http://www.digitalartform.com/archives/2004/12/history_of_phot.html
i just found this program [mac] and have, so far, mosaic-ed two pics using google images. however, both pics have been "done" with a lot of black space left -- maybe 10 percent. any thoughts?
nevermind, i now see that i have to research different terms when google runs out.
Hi, i just started some contest for grafic people and it would be great if you participate as grafic pro's
Please help. I really want to learn how to make a photo mosaic. Problem is, I don't have a computer and a digital camera. I hope you can help me.
Andrea Mosaic which i followed the link posted here when I ran it I noticed with virus protection both mcafee and even tried norton on another machine but detects it as malware which malware is bad very bad dont know if its just my virus protection both are enterprise editions I update my virus deffinitions every 2 days
Although I was rather impressed with Centarsia
Centarsia is great small installation they even provide you with a serial number so you can adjust the size now if only I can find a faster way to remove every frame from video's faster rather then having to use vegas video and saving each image manually If anyone can recomend a faster way I would apriciate it cause right now im on frame 300 and I have 7000 more frames to go
to make movie DNA'S I found a great page on making some amazing posters using a program called process
http://plasticbugs.com/index.php?p=278
Thanks so much!!!?
Is there a Mosaic application in wich the small tiles can have different sizes?