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

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

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.

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...

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

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?