Mosaic Generator

Okay, we’ve all seen those big posters in tourist-y shops of well known images (Millennium Falcon, Steve McQueen, some jam…) that are – on closer inspection – made up of lots of mini-images in a mosaic-esque effect. If the artist is really clever, they will use related images to build up the bigger image; in the Millennium Falcon example, they used scenes from Star Wars. I think you get the idea.

Well now you can reproduce the hard work and hours of effort by simply using a slightly AJAXified website. You supply the image file (it supports PNG, GIF, JPG and JPEG files) and it will produce an image concatenated together from a bunch of Flickr photos. Being the curious sort, I naturally tried it out – the resulting images are quite impressive.

Click on the images to view larger versions

Steve McQueen

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Stereophonics – Have a Nice Day

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Richard Ashcroft (The Verve – Bittersweet Symphony)

Tom (from Tom and Jerry)

Yeah, you may remember this picture from an earlier post. Just goes to show it works on cartoons and not just people folk.

Don’t Steal

This just demonstrates it works on text too – very well in fact. Another mosaic it generated but that I didn’t save was of a screenshot of my Ubuntu desktop – and it captured the quite small writing on the menu items very well.

I made this photo to try and dissuade people on other forums (and MySpace, grr) stealing images. The ones we have of Crysis / Crytek are very popular.

Me

I know, it’s not my most flattering photo, but I picked it specifically.

Okay so you get the idea. Why don’t you go to the site and generate a few mosaics for yourself? It’s a fun way to pass the time…

…and speaking of passing the time, it probably took over an hour and a half to write this post; the majority of which was spent making uploads work. Of course, uploading and inlining the images wasn’t exactly a two second job either. You’d better enjoy this post!