I have always been a fan of the ascii-art pictures that were so popular on the usenet about 5 years ago. So you can imagine the first photomosaic I saw blew me away! For those of you who have not heard of photomosaics they are simply images which are made up of thousands of smaller tile images. This technique for creating images was developed by a Rob Silvers, some information on him and the company he formed can be found at www.photomosaic.com.

The computer power and number of images needed to create a photomosaic is quite considerable. For this reason there has been a lack of decent cheap/shareware software for the creation of photomosaics. Over the past year I have found the following software:

Of all of these applications my current favourite is Mosaic Magic by Fishsoft. It may nothave all the options that some of the others has ... but it has one of the best user interfaces, and it is very cheap.

In order to create a good photomosaic it is essential that you have a large collection of images. You can buy clip art CD's but why bother when you have the internet at you disposal? Your life is made much easier if you use an automatic picture extractor. I have tried out numerous tools and the only one I can recommend is PicPluck, its fast and totally free.

This website has a small number of photomosaic galleries which I have created. I hope you enjoy them! Some of them make very good Windows wallpaper. I have also included the tile libraries that I created. These can be dowloaded, although some are quite large.

peace,
Photomosaic Fan.