Make it a Mosaic

We are so excited to have a guest with us today — Kimberly Lund.  She is known around the digi world as MISS KIM and she has been around for as long as I can remember.  We have served on creative teams together and she was on my creative team for a while.  She is super sweet and super talented!  You can see her gallery HERE and her blog HERE.

I was wasting spending time on Facebook a few weeks ago and came across some really photo mosaics that Kim had made.  I wrote her and told her how cool I thought they were and asked if she would like to be a guest here at THE DAILY DIGI.  She said yes and I am so excited to bring you her really cool article on  making REALLY cool photo mosaics!  Here we go….

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Like many digital scrapbookers, I enjoy creating albums of the big events in our lives; vacations are so important to my family and since I started scrapbooking I’ve created some form of vacation album each year. However, I can’t hang an album on the wall, and sometimes I want to create a photo keepsake that will allow me to remember an entire trip.

I was so delighted to find AndreaMosaic.  It is a free download that allows you to create multiphoto mosaics out of any photo you’d like. If you like the program and want to donate at least $38, the creator will also send you the Professional version of the software. The website for the software is full of tutorials and information to help you customize a mosaic to create your own photo keepsake.

Once you open the program, the first thing you will need to do is create a database file of photos that you want used in your mosaic creation. For my first project, I copied and pasted the photos I wanted to use into a new folder on my hard drive, and had AndreaMosaic create the database from that folder. Later, as I grew more familiar with the program and wanted to use multiple folders of photos, such as vacation photos, I found it less time consuming to just point AndreaMosaic at the folders I wanted it to use to create the database. Again, the website tutorials have much more detailed information on creating databases.

After your database is created and saved to your computer, the fun starts. First, you can choose the base photo that you want to be turned into a mosaic. I’ve found that you can safely use low quality images from the web for your base photo. Since you’re going to be recreating the base photo with miniatures of your own high quality photos, the quality of the base photo doesn’t seem to be as important.

After choosing your base photo, you get to tweak all your settings. There is a drop-down menu to choose the size of your mosaic. I usually go big here because I know it will resize well.

Next, choose how many tiles you want in your mosaic. I’ve found that the more tiles, the better the mosaic looks. You can also decide how many times you want a particular photo to be reused, if you want to allow the program to flip or rotate your photos in order for them to fit, how many tiles should separate duplicate photos, and how much you will allow the program to colorize your photos.

I’ve chosen to allow the AndreaMosaic program a lot of room for error in creating my mosaics. My goal is to have a large framed mosaic to hang on my wall that will allow me to remember a whole trip at a glance, so I don’t mind flipped and colorized photos. For others, they may want the program to stick with original photos as much as possible. I love that the program gives me the flexibility to make those choices.

Here’s a few mosaics that I recently created with our photos. For one, I used our recent family photos, for another I used photos from our 2007 Disney trip. Finally, I created a mosaic using the logo of my favorite Branson show. I had it printed and took it with me over Spring Break when we went to see the show. I had all the family members sign the mosaic and framed it to hang above my computer area.

The possibilities are endless… a mosaic of baby’s first year, a mosaic to be featured at a senior’s graduation party, or a mosaic of photos from the wedding couple’s courtship. Let your creativity shine.

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Thank you SO MUCH Kim for sharing this really cool idea with us!  There are really so many possibilities…so cool to think about!

P.S.  Just wanted to let you know…one downside of this program is that right now it is just for Windows.  If you use a Mac and run parallels, you can still use it.  However, they do link to a program called MacOSaiX that will make Mosaics with a Mac.  I tried it and it works great (though I do recommend starting it when you are going to bed….it takes a while!)