Ever since I created that Christmas Calendar Cover Page that I mentioned earlier (and put in the downloads section) I have been seeing “photo mosaics” everywhere.  Photo Mosaics are large photographs that–when viewed up close–consist of hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of smaller images arranged by overall shade and color to represent a “pixel” in the large photo.  If you squint or view the large image from afar, it looks like a normal photograph, but the closer you get the more detail you can see in the hundreds of tinier images.  I saw a large poster of a president at Kevin’s school that was a photomosaic, and when Christmas shopping I also saw a photomosaic jigsaw puzzle from Disney which consisted of a large cel from a Disney cartoon, and all of the smaller images were each inividual frames from other Disney movies–over 1,000 cels in all.  It’s fascinating to me.

So over the last few days I’ve been researching and trying out the free programs that create these Photomosaic images.  I tried several shareware programs, none of which gave me the kind of resolution I’d like in their “free” versions.  If you pay for the “full” or “professional” version of the program you presumably get the high-resolution mosaics that I was looking for.  Sometimes, depending on the program, this could be $25, or $50, sometimes even $100 or more for the “full” version.  That is, until I found a program called “Centarsia.”  Centarsia is a freeware mosaic program that does exactly what I want it to, nothing more, nothing less.  A lot of the other programs had many more features, but as I said, you have to pay for them to get all of the features (and the high-resolution mosaics).  This one appears to have been originally written to be a commerical application (there’s even a “Pricing” link on the website), but when you click on it it tells you it’s a free program, and then gives you a username (“webuser”) and a serial number (“09765-44986-1205716296”) to enter into the program to “register” it.  This is important information too, because just like the other programs, without “registering” it you’re limited to low-resolution mosaics. Once registered with this generic user info though, it works great and you can have unlimited mosaics with unlimited photo “block” images for it to choose its “pixels” from.

So far I’ve created only one big mosaic.  They take a while to create, since they access so many different photographs to compose an image, but it’s pretty fun to watch as it progresses.  Keep in mind, if you try this yourself, that you need a pretty wide variety of images for it to choose from to make halfway decent mosaics.  For my first one, which you can view with the link below, I used over 4,000 photos consisting of every digital photo I took in 2005.  I found a decent online “viewer” for them too, so this should make it pretty easy for you to get a good idea of exactly what a photomosaic is, in case you haven’t heard of them before.  Click here to take a look (or click on the thumbnail above).  Use the “+” and “-” controls at the bottom of the image to zoom in and out.  Once you zoom in all the way, drag the image around and look at all the photos close-up.  Let me know what you think.  Remember, it’s only my first attempt.