MacOSaiX: Your Memories Make the Big Picture
Creating mosaics can be a very long, and difficult process. There are online services out there such as Magic Mosaics that create mosaics for a price, but why pay someone else to do something you can do yourself right? This is where I found MacOSaiX to be an extremely useful, and fun application.
The UI of this app is quite clutter-free and clean. To create a mosaic, it is a simple 3 step process.
First, you must select the image you want to make the mosaic from. This is the picture that will be put back together using your photo library.
Next, is deciding the details of your mosaic. There are 3 options for the shape of the tiles (Rectangles, Hexagons and Puzzle Pieces), and an option to set how many tiles your mosaic will consist of. You can have anywhere from 100 tiles (10 across, 10 down), to 2500 tiles (50 across, 50 down).
The last step in creating the mosaic is the image sources. By default, your /users/*username*/Pictures folder is used. You can have more than 1 picture source, so you can pool your pictures from multiple folders. You can also have it search and use images from Google. The quality of your mosaic will depend on how complex your mosaic is, and how many pictures you have.
Once you hit “Go!, MacOSaiX will begin piecing pictures from your library together to look like the original that you chose earlier. As the mosaic is being created, you have 2 view options. You can see the original image side-by-side with the mosaic or just the mosaic itself. The third option is for cleaning up your mosaic. You can select a tile and replace it with an image of your choice.
MacOSaiX is more of a fun app, but can really come in handy sometimes. It is available for free download from the developer’s site.
I’ve used this app in the past. While it is very cool, and does work, it is VERY slow. And if you’re working on a large mosaic you plan on using for commercial printing, set your computer to NOT sleep or try to use any other apps – more often than not, the process will hang and never complete if you interrupt it in any way.
Other than that, great program!
In my time using this app I only ever had one time where it froze on me. Though as you said, it can be quite slow at times.