Foto-Mosaik-Edda is a free mosaic picture creator/generator from sixdots.de: “you can create mosaic-pictures, which are composed of many small pictures (tiles), from your own photos” which was recently featured on Lifehacker. The site is of German origin and no I didn’t want to try it just because I am living in Germany at the moment, it looked very interesting and since it is free I obviously clicked on through to download and try it out. The comments on Lifehacker also point you to other such programs. Unfortunately it was a Windows executable and I didn’t feel like trying it out with Wine in Linux Mint (my default OS). But no matter, there’s always my Virtualbox virtual machine, running XP.
On to the download and install. The software is free but the others will not say no to a donation via Paypal of which you are reminded of the first 7 or 6 times you start the program. The first thing to do is create a database of pictures the program would use to create the final picture. I added all the pictures from my digital camera which is around 1500 picture. Note that the more pictures you use the better the final mosaic as the software will have a lot of pictures to choose from. This took a log time fro me as I was running this in a virtual machine and adding the pictures from a shared virtual folder and I chose the highest settings for my pictures. So “The single pictures will be analyzed and copied into one or more databases. You can use your holiday photos, pictures of the last family celebration or even take over whole picture-CDs into the database.” The main menu is shown below:
After you have added your pictures to the database “A simple to use wizard will guide you through the program and will turn the creation of your own photo-mosaic into a piece of cake. Amaze others with this extraordinary effect. Just try it!”
So I did, you can then click on Create mosaic-picture button and follow the Wizard, to choose your picture:
I chose the picture I usually use as my profile picture, which is of me at Ile aux Cerfs in Mauritius, in 2008, wearing my Choong Fam t-shirt.
You then choose the database you would like to use and are then taken to the mosaic options screen:
This is the important screen, my first attempt was using the default settings which outputted the following picture:
As you can see it is not as detailed as the first picture in this post. My advice here is to experiment, but only if you have an adequately powerful computer as it may take some time to render the image.
The options page allows you to set the number of tiles (the more tiles the better the final mosaic will be).
The format of the tiles, I found quadratic worked best here.
The resolution in PPI and the Paper size, as per your personal preference, mine was A4 in case I would like to print it at home in the future.
The final screen before rendering is another options screen. The first option asking the number of times a tile can be used. If you do not have many pictures in your database, like me, you should set this number quite high, I had it set to 50 for the top picture. I left the other options alone, but you can Force the program to use all the pictures in your database and change how much of the original picture may be blended into the final image, I believe a higher blend percentage will result in a finer picture but less detail in the tiles.
You can now click the Start button and the image will be created through several steps such as loading the database, analyzing the picture, choosing the tiles and rendering. The rendering process takes the longest but it all depends on your choice of settings and the processing and graphic power of your computer.
Overall it is a niece piece of software but I don’t think I will be donating to the author(s) as I have done with other software in the past as I don’t see myself using this regularly or even again. I just wanted to give it a try. But if you like it, have fun and I would like to see some of the pictures you create.
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