Show HN: I made a tool to generate photomosaics with your pictures • Hacker News Board

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

#11

Post by jakemanger » Mon, Jul 28, 2025, 1:17 PM UTC

jnovacho wrote: post #10

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?

If you adjust the overlay alpha to 0% you'll see it does use the submitted photos as tiles.

Click the "Create Mosaic" button and you should see it arrange the tiles live in the best possible way to reproduce the image. The overlay is a common technique people use to make the main image more visible. It's a personal preference thing.

Generally, the more diverse or colours you select for your tile images, the more clear and "good" the main mosaic image will be

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

#12

Post by jakemanger » Mon, Jul 28, 2025, 1:18 PM UTC

wvlia5 wrote: post #8

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

I could. That sounds like a great idea! Was thinking about uneven sized tiles. I just tried to make the basic photo mosaic with even sized tiles for now

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

#13

Post by jakemanger » Mon, Jul 28, 2025, 1:19 PM UTC

the_arun wrote: post #9

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

I suppose you could make an art business. Or at least do what a few camera stores do

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

#14

Post by ColinEberhardt » Mon, Jul 28, 2025, 1:23 PM UTC

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.

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

#15

Post by jakemanger » Mon, Jul 28, 2025, 1:30 PM UTC

ColinEberhardt wrote: post #14

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…

Thanks for sharing! Both the link and the story. As a University student and someone that has here also made a photomosaic app, that is super relatable.

That's good to know about the pricing. It's free for now. Honestly didn't expect this level of interest (there's 307 people on the site right now according to analytics).

With that interest, I may add some plans - potentially for the commercial use in particular

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

#16

Post by btbuildem » Mon, Jul 28, 2025, 1:35 PM UTC

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.

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

#17

Post by talkingtab » Mon, Jul 28, 2025, 1:36 PM UTC

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... ]

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

#18

Post by benbojangles » Mon, Jul 28, 2025, 1:39 PM UTC

the_arun wrote: post #9

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

it's hardly a David Hockney

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

#19

Post by jakemanger » Mon, Jul 28, 2025, 1:43 PM UTC

btbuildem wrote: post #16

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.

haha there's a few similar stories coming on here now. Great to hear.

Hey, if you want to do that with this software, I can't see any files you upload (it's all local processing in your web browser), so go for it.

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

#20

Post by mentalgear » Mon, Jul 28, 2025, 1:50 PM UTC

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!