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

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

#31

Post by wang_li »

bazzargh wrote: post #6

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 ove…

There is a naive approach to making this kind of thing that reduces the component images to such a small size (2-3 pixels in large image) that turns this into more of a dithering exercise than looking for artifacts in each component image to match up lines. It's still a nice effect, but it's quite different when the component images are > 10% the size of the final image, instead of < 1% the size.

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

#33

Post by teiferer »

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…

Kudos to OP for not immediately thinking about how he best could monetize this.

I'm glad FOSS made Shareware die out, but now web apps requiring me to create an account first have taken its place. Kudos to OP for resisting that too.

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

#34

Post by waltbosz »

darod wrote: post #32

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

The website says it runs locally. In browser JavaScript , you can import a file from local file system to JavaScript's local scope without sending it to a server. I'm guessing that's how this app works.

If you want to know for sure, open your browser's dev tools, switch to the network tab, import a file and watch to see if a network request is made.

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

#35

Post by Theodores »

bazzargh wrote: post #6

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 ove…

Whilst you are at it...

https://github.com/openseadragon/openseadragon

A photo mosaic demands to have photos that are high resolution. You don't want to zoom in to find blurry jpegs, it just isn't right!

I have had great fun with OpenSeadragon in the past and now there is the VIPS image processing library for writing out a massive set of image tiles.

Hence it is possible to work with thumbnails and then render out the thing with OpenSeadragon and VIPS.

OpenSeadragon was amazing when it was a Microsoft demo a few decades ago, but time has moved on. I wonder what can be done with tilesets in HTML5 with picture tags or in SVG to present a infinitely zoomable montage.

I like your suggestion and the options for rotating and clipping images with SVG methods. I always confuse mask and clip, but, in SVG, much could be done.

For me, the starting point would be to do an SVG with thousands of images in it, to just watch my computer crash as I step up the resolution. Really I want to recreate OpenSeadragon in SVG...

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

#36

Post by jakemanger »

waltbosz wrote: post #34
darod wrote: post #32

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

The website says it runs locally. In browser JavaScript , you can import a file from local file system to JavaScript's local scope without sending it to a server. I'm guessing that's how this app works. If you want to know for sure, open your browser's dev tools, switch to the network tab, import a file and watch to see if a network request is made.

Yes, that's exactly right. All your images are processed locally and don't leave your device. They are all processed in the web browser with javascript and your dev tools like you say should show that.

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

#37

Post by wvlia5 »

jakemanger wrote: post #36
waltbosz wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The website says it runs locally. In browser JavaScript , you can import a file from local file system to JavaScript's local scope without sending it to a server. I'm guessing that's how this app works. If you want to know for sure, open your browser's dev tools, switch to the network tab, import a file and watch to see if a network request is made.

Yes, that's exactly right. All your images are processed locally and don't leave your device. They are all processed in the web browser with javascript and your dev tools like you say should show that.

I think he means "why does it have to upload to the browser, can't it just read from the filesystem?" it should work, but browsers make it more complicated.

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

#38

Post by ElCapitanMarkla »

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.

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

#39

Post by jakemanger »

bryanthompson wrote: post #28
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…

I used Mosaic Magic back in my high school journalism class to design a yearbook cover 20+ years ago! Turned out great - it won some kind of award iirc.

That is so funny - after all these years you were sitting at your computer at the same time and clicked on the same post as the creator

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

#40

Post by jakemanger »

ElCapitanMarkla wrote: post #38

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.

oh wow that is a beautiful photo mosaic. Well done.
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