Collect many pictures and make one big one!

Does anybody know of a program, tutorial or plug in that will help

you gather lots of images and put them toghether to create a big

collage of one image that you already have?

Kind of using pixels to create an image but instead you use pictures.

how would you call that?

Thanks in advance.

The best program I can think of is a pair of scissors and some experimentation.

I used to entertain myself and coworkers with my photocollages. We used cameras to document our field work and there would always be a few frames left over, so I'd use them up around the office. When I accumulated enough snapshots I'd cut and paste them together, using several photos of the same person to recreate them in collage form. It looked a bit like something from Picasso's Cubism era.

To make these experiments easier you might want to scan your photos and use cheap inkjet prints on ordinary paper.

If you want to create a collage with smoother joints and transitions you could use the cut 'n' paste method as a blueprint and then use scans of these same photos to make a finished version digitally.

Most decent image editing programs have tools for stitching and merging images together, but some are better than others. My versions of Corel Photo Paint and Jasc Paint Shop Pro are pretty old so there are probably more up to date utilities, either built in or as plug-ins.

<p>Hi,</p>

<p>I think the technique you're talking about is called 'photomosaic', and unfortunately for everyone there's a patent courtesy of a company called <a href="http://www.photomosaic.com/">Runaway</a>... so if you want to sell images that look like that, you need to license the tech/idea from them.</p>

<p>That said, there's a Free Software (GPL) program that generates these given the source images, called <a href="http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/~schani/metapixel/">Metapixel</a>. It runs under Linux, you can probably compile it on Mac OS X and Windows as well.</p>

<p>-- jv</p>

A friend pointed me at <a href="http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/~schani/metapixel/">metapixel</a>

I haven't used it, but he has an the results look pretty cool.

"I think the technique you're talking about is called 'photomosaic', and unfortunately for everyone there's a patent courtesy of a company called Runaway... so if you want to sell images that look like that, you need to license the tech/idea from them."

As I understand patent law, they can patent the software technique they created that makes these images, but if someone creates a unique software technique that produces the same results, or produces a mosaic by hand, there's nothing they can do about it. The idea of a mosaic is pretty general and predates this company.