How to create a photo mosaic with your own pictures

Posted on October 9, 2007 at 8:02 am

If you ever watch TV or get out of the house, you have probably seen a photo mosaic before at some point in your life. A photo mosaic is basically a picture that is created by using lots of other smaller images. You can create a mosaic from 10 pictures of 1,000 pictures, depending on how good you want it to match the original picture. The more images you use, the better the final mosaic will look like the original picture.

Here’s an example of a photo mosaic. As you can see, the picture is of a flower, but it’s made up of pictures from a beach, flowers, sunsets, forests, and lots more.

You can create your own mosaics using a free software called AndreaMosaic. The software works really well and is pretty easy to use. Once you have it installed, you can configure all of the options before you create the mosaic.

First you’ll have to choose a collection of photos from your computer by clicking Find Tiles. The software will search through the folder and all subfolders looking for pictures and then will analyze all of them. Click Create Collection and choose the folder with all of your photos to save the file in. The more the better! Remember that when it has finished analyzing, you need to click Load Collection and choose the file that you just saved above.

For Step 2, you can configure the width of the mosaic, the number of tiles per row, the width of each tile, and the border size.

You’ll also notice at the bottom that the program automatically calculates how many photos you’ll need based on the numbers in the boxes above. So in my case I changed the number of tiles per row to 40 and now I’ll need a total of 1600 photos. You can play around with the numbers to get it near the number that you have.

You can also configure settings like how many times a tile can be duplicated and the distance between duplicated tiles, etc. Step 3 is where you’ll choose the photo that you want to make into a mosaic.

Finally, click Create the Mosaic’s and the process will begin. Depending on how many large your mosaic is this process can take a little while, so be ready to sit and watch!

I’ve found that using less pictures actually makes the mosaic look much more interesting. If you use too many photos, then your mosaic will look just like your original and that’s kind of boring.

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