Introduction
For many years, I have been wanting to experiment with photo mosaic techniques. I have always thought that they were cool.
A photo mosaic is a somewhat fuzzy picture that is made up of a bunch of tiny pictures arranged in a grid. When looking closely at the picture, you can see the little images that have been stitched together to form the bigger picture. The further back you go away from the mosaic, the more it resembles the original picture.
I wanted to experiment with the photo mosaic technique to determine what type of base photos will make good mosaics. What I mean is that I wanted to try landscape images, portraits, objects like rocks, and other things like cars. In this article, you can see some results from my initial testings of the method. If I can find some extra time this winter, I might write a photo mosaic workflow in Alteryx. That would be fun, indeed.
Background
Being a scientific guy that has written a lot of reports, I tend to use Tableau to produce graphics for articles, reports, etc. The other day, I decided to gather those jpeg files into a collection and use them to produce some photo mosaic images. I was surprised to see that I have generated thousands of Tableau graphics. One of the reasons I wanted to use these graphics for the mosaics is that they typically are colorful and are quite varied across the color spectrum.
When I started this work, I immediately thought that this is another form of a Tableau viz in a viz. In the cases shown below, there are several thousand Tableau visuals (figures) used to make a photo mosaic viz. I know it is a simple play on words, but I love the idea of Tableau visuals being used in this way.
As can be seen in the slideshow below, the program TurboMosaic was used to make the images. The program costs about $27 for one year of usage. Each rendering takes many hours to complete because thousands of Tableau images were used to create each photo mosaic. You can use rectangular, hexagonal, or circular grids to create the mosaic.
The figures shown below are the configuration screens used in the software. The left side shows the configurations you can choose, and the right side shows a small sampling of the Tableau graphics I loaded into the program to generate the mosaics.
There are a wide variety of photo mosaic output sizes, including designs for Twitter and Facebook. I think this is a clever program that offers just the right amount of custom settings. I wish the program were faster than it is, however. Considering I through nearly 3,000 high-resolution graphics at the TurboMosaic program, I would imagine it is much faster than I realize!
The Mosaics
The slideshow below shows the original picture with the superimposed mosaic grid and then the photo mosaic that was created. There are other objects I’d like to test, but for now, I have gained an appreciation for what is possible.
Here is a detailed view of one of the mosaics of my daughter Sarah. I have taken several pictures to show how the photo mosaic becomes more clear the further away you are from it.
Thanks for reading!
