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Show HN: I made a tool to generate photomosaics with your pictures

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Hi HN!

I wanted to make some photomosaics for an anniversary gift, but I ended up building this tool and turning it into a website that anyone can use.

For those who don’t know, a photomosaic is an image made up of many smaller tile images, arranged in a way that forms a larger, recognisable picture.

The best part? Everything runs directly in your browser. No files are uploaded, and there’s no sign-up required.

Very cool. I actually created a shareware application that rendered Photomosaics 25 years ago! Here is a link to "Mosaic Magic" from the Wayback Engine:

https://web.archive.org/web/20010405175706/http://fishsoft.c...

I managed to make a decent amount of spending money from that application during my University years.

One interesting lesson I learnt was about enterprise pricing. I think I charged ~$20 for Mosaic Magic, however, I started to get emails from organisations asking about pricing for commercial use. Nothing on my pricing page suggested that commercial use was prohibited, I guess they just thought $20 was rather cheap. From there-on, I charged $150 for "commercial use". Basically, anyone who thought they should be paying more, did!

Finally, Robert Silvers filed a patent and trademark for Photomosaics in ~2000, and was, for a while aggressively pursuing organisations that he felt was infringing. I assume this has all died down now.

8 days agoby ColinEberhardt

An alternative: http://imagequilts.com/

The link comes from Edward Tufte's web site.

These are at least related to Edward Tufte. If you scroll to the bottom there is information about installing a Chrome Extension (disclaimer: I do not use Chrome) that will generate an image quilt.

The author of the Extension is given as Adam Schwartz.

[edit: Chrome store link is https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/imagequilts/ceebcpb... ]

8 days agoby talkingtab

While this is nice enough, it bothers me that these don't look much like "art". If you look at real roman mosaics, they do not place points in a grid - they use a technique called "opus vermiculatum" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opus_vermiculatum ... snaking the tiles around so that there is a flow to it; the overall effect is much better.

I think that'd be possible to automate too. I was doing something related over here: https://hachyderm.io/@bazzargh/112767548339559102 - in that I was trying to generate sketch-like renderings from photographs. What I did was to pick random points, look at the brightness gradient (taken from the Sobel operator, there are other ways to do this), move up the gradient a bit and sketch some parallel lines (and then various experiments with hatching for shading the flatter areas)

In a similar way you could start with a grid of tiles _with some separation_, and allow them to move and align better with the gradient of the underlying picture, and not lie _on_ edges, if possible. If they overlap, allow the tessera to be cut, and only then choose images to colour-match the average on the tile, leaving some "grout" in the image (I'd probably speckle that a bit so it didn't look too uniform). Then the result might look more like real mosaics.

I might give this a go...

8 days agoby bazzargh

A friend of mine made this in the late 90s -- we were in highschool at the time. Of course he used it to make renditions of scantily-clad ladies out of thousands of pictures of, you guessed it.

8 days agoby btbuildem

Nice! Almost 20 years ago I paid good money to get this done.

I see that your method also uses a lot of tinting and even overlaying the original image.

Would be great though if this was adjustable via sliders!

Thank You for making this available local-/privacy-first & in-browser!

8 days agoby mentalgear

This looks cool, I will check it out.

I spent a heap of time about 15 years ago playing with various mosaic software before landing on https://www.andreaplanet.com/andreamosaic/ - I built an endlessly zooming mosiac for a museum - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdC8sk08Vc4

It was supposed to run for 3 years but last time I was there it was still playing on the big projector.

7 days agoby ElCapitanMarkla

Small suggestion: in the "Try These Examples" section, the call-to-action is click a button that is not initially visible. Users have to hover over the image to see the "recreate" button, which is not obvious. You should add a dedicate "Recreate" button below each example so it's immediately clear what to do.

Also it would a good idea to have a detail view of a sample image at 100% to show that the images are made up of other photos. Maybe even an interactive zoom window. At monitor resolutions, the full images mostly just look like smudgy photos, and not all users may be familiar with photomosiacs. Even the "view" option on the sample mosiacs does not let you see the detail of the individual tiles very well.

8 days agoby pimlottc

If we combine this with canvas printing, we have an art business.

8 days agoby the_arun

Awesome stuff! It would also be nice to add Opus Spicatum method when tiles are set at angles to form a “herringbone” zigzag pattern. It should be quite easy to implement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opus_spicatum

7 days agoby raydenvm

How exactly does this work? The example I chose is a mosaic of photos, over which is overlayed the original image with alpha set to 50%.

So it does not use the submitted photos as tiles, right?

8 days agoby jnovacho

Excited to check this out. Did you write your own library for this or use something like OpenSeaDragon behind-the-scenes?

8 days agoby aosaigh

why does this require uploading my photos? can't something like this run native?

8 days agoby darod

Will you implement a recursive mosaic feature (some tiles bigger than others)?

8 days agoby wvlia5

How hard is it to get something like this to work with HEIC?

8 days agoby cactusplant7374