How To Make Great Photo Mosaics with Metapixel

I’d like to introduce you to a pretty neat program called Metapixel which produces photomosaics. The programs website describes it as this:

Metapixel is a program for generating photomosaics. It can generate classical photomosaics, in which the source image is viewed as a matrix of equally sized rectangles for each of which a matching image is substitued, as well as collage-style photomosaics, in which rectangular parts of the source image at arbitrary positions (i.e. not aligned to a matrix) are substituted by matching images.

Basically, it takes your collection of photos and turns them into smaller chunks to fill in one large photo. Here’s a look at what we’ll be making:

From Mosaics

1.) So, let’s get started! First, we’ll want to actually install the program!*

For Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install metapixel

For Fedora 8:

su
//Enter Password//
yum install metapixel

2.) Next, we’ll want to create a directory where our prepared images will be stored:

mkdir .metapixel

3.) This is the step where we actually prepare the images.** You’ll have to do a little customization on this line though. Replace “pictures_folder/” with the directory containing your images such as “My\ Pictures/2007/“.

metapixel-prepare -r pictures_folder/ .metapixel

4.) This is the fun part. All of this command here will create your photomosaic. This command will also require some customization. Replace “input_file.jpg” with the image you want to make a mosiac out of. Replace “output_file.jpg” with the file name of your choosing. This will be the new mosaic picture.

metapixel --metapixel input_file.jpg output_file.jpg -l ~/.metapixel/ --cheat=30 --width=35 --height=35 --metric=wavelet --distance=20

So, there you have it! You should now have an awesome photomosaic that will be fun to share with your family members and friends! See more of my examples here: Fun with Photo Mosaics!

Note from the Author:
Other websites have explained how to do this, but when following their instructions I felt that the pictures quality results were poor. So, after a little bit more research, as well as trial and error, I think that the way I outlined above is the best way to get photo mosaics using this program. You can play around with the settings yourself if you’d like to see if you can get any better results for yourself. To see a list of options, just type into the terminal: metapixel --help

* Now, if you’re running Ubuntu or Fedora 8, it will be very easy to install because it’s already in the repositories. If you’re not running Ubuntu or Fedora 8, you’ll have to check to see if your distribution has it for yourself. It should.

** Preparing the images may actually take a while to do depending on your library size. Mine was about 1600+ and it took a good 20 minutes. So, you may want to narrow your collection down to a select few before preparing them. It is suggested that you have at least 1000 images for the best quality.

There are also other programs available as well for other platforms:

Windows: http://www.andreaplanet.com/andreamosaic/
OS X: http://homepage.mac.com/knarf/MacOSaiX/
.Net: http://mosaic.bloomaniac.de/

Source: http://www.constantlythinking.com/?p=487

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