About

What are photo mosaics?

Photo mosaics are larger photos made up entirely from smaller images to create the larger photo by using the smaller photos shape and colours to form the larger photo

Why make this?

A few years ago I discovered photo mosaics through some popular art installations (most notably the photo mosaic art installation of Queen Elizabeth II made entirely from photos of people in the UK displayed at Gatwick Airport)

After having just finished my last university exam and my girlfriend and I's aniversary coming up I thought this would make a great gift: a photo of us made entirely of photos together over the years.

So I started looking around online for services to create this for me. However I quickly found I wasn't happy with any of these offering for a few reasons:

Firstly, most of the solutions I saw were \"faking\" the colour of the photos to get the desired effect. This is done by taking all the photos you want to include; arranging them in a random order and then overlaying the desired photo on top with some transparency

Secondly, these solutions required me to upload these photos to a server somewhere. I don't know about you but many of my photos are very precious to me and private; I certainly didn't want to upload these memories to a server from someone I don't trust.

So being a software developer (and a lover of computer science working on lots of small computer projects ) - that left me with one option: make it myself

I started researching how I might achieve this; experimenting with image processing; making sure I got a quality result. After a lot of experimentation I finally created my gift; got it printed and framed and gave it to my girlfriend (she was very pleased!) and now hangs on our living room wall to this day!

It didn't take long before our friends and family noticed this and started asking if they could have also have one which leads me to this web app.

I want everyone to be able to enjoy their photos and memories in a new way whilst not using any tricks and making sure everyone's photos stay private to them.