Foto-Mosaik-Edda

You may have noticed, on some web pages, huge mosaics that were created with thousands of pictures. If you are wondering how they were made, you should know that no one spends that much time placing images, one by one, to form a large one and you could create one yourself. Unless you have too much time to spare, you can use Foto-Mosaik-Edda to create high resolution mosaics in less than a minute. You can either use your own pictures or set the application to find free images on Flickr.

With an average Internet connection, you can download the 1.33 Mb setup package in a few moments. The software can be installed just as fast, thanks to the straightforward setup process. The system requirements are not high, so you can run the application on most Windows powered machines.

The software will guide you through different stages, just like a wizard. Mosaics are created using pictures from a database. You may start creating a mosaic, build a database, order a poster of your creation or access the preferences panel by clicking the options on the application's welcome screen. When creating a database, you can add photos from your hard drive or search for pictures on Flickr. Alternatively, you may add images in existing databases or remove them.

There are three mosaic styles available. You can choose a classic, parquet or chaos mosaic by clicking radio buttons. After selecting a style, you will need to choose a picture from your hard drive, for the main theme. When the process is complete, the contents of your database will form the selected image. Other settings include setting a format for the mosaic (single or multiple image files), selecting one or more databases, specifying the paper's size, resolution and layout or setting the maximum number of times a tile can be repeated. If you do not have enough pictures, it is recommended that you set this value to a high number.

It is also possible to overlay the original image over the mosaic, with a transparency level of your choosing. A preview of the result is displayed on the left side of the interface, but you can also view it on a separate window, where zoom options are available.