Show HN: I made a tool to generate photomosaics with your pictures
95 jakemanger 34 7/28/2025, 11:23:50 AM pictiler.com ↗
Hi HN!
I wanted to make some photomosaics for an anniversary gift, but I ended up building this tool and turning it into a website that anyone can use.
For those who don’t know, a photomosaic is an image made up of many smaller tile images, arranged in a way that forms a larger, recognisable picture.
The best part? Everything runs directly in your browser. No files are uploaded, and there’s no sign-up required.
https://web.archive.org/web/20010405175706/http://fishsoft.c...
I managed to make a decent amount of spending money from that application during my University years.
One interesting lesson I learnt was about enterprise pricing. I think I charged ~$20 for Mosaic Magic, however, I started to get emails from organisations asking about pricing for commercial use. Nothing on my pricing page suggested that commercial use was prohibited, I guess they just thought $20 was rather cheap. From there-on, I charged $150 for "commercial use". Basically, anyone who thought they should be paying more, did!
Finally, Robert Silvers filed a patent and trademark for Photomosaics in ~2000, and was, for a while aggressively pursuing organisations that he felt was infringing. I assume this has all died down now.
That's good to know about the pricing. It's free for now. Honestly didn't expect this level of interest (there's 307 people on the site right now according to analytics).
With that interest, I may add some plans - potentially for the commercial use in particular
I'm glad FOSS made Shareware die out, but now web apps requiring me to create an account first have taken its place. Kudos to OP for resisting that too.
The link comes from Edward Tufte's web site.
These are at least related to Edward Tufte. If you scroll to the bottom there is information about installing a Chrome Extension (disclaimer: I do not use Chrome) that will generate an image quilt.
The author of the Extension is given as Adam Schwartz.
[edit: Chrome store link is https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/imagequilts/ceebcpb... ]
I think that'd be possible to automate too. I was doing something related over here: https://hachyderm.io/@bazzargh/112767548339559102 - in that I was trying to generate sketch-like renderings from photographs. What I did was to pick random points, look at the brightness gradient (taken from the Sobel operator, there are other ways to do this), move up the gradient a bit and sketch some parallel lines (and then various experiments with hatching for shading the flatter areas)
In a similar way you could start with a grid of tiles _with some separation_, and allow them to move and align better with the gradient of the underlying picture, and not lie _on_ edges, if possible. If they overlap, allow the tessera to be cut, and only then choose images to colour-match the average on the tile, leaving some "grout" in the image (I'd probably speckle that a bit so it didn't look too uniform). Then the result might look more like real mosaics.
I might give this a go...
The author didn't invent this style. The first thing I thought of was the poster for the Truman Show. https://artofthemovies.co.uk/products/the-truman-show-1998-m... The site seems to make that happen quite well.
https://github.com/openseadragon/openseadragon
A photo mosaic demands to have photos that are high resolution. You don't want to zoom in to find blurry jpegs, it just isn't right!
I have had great fun with OpenSeadragon in the past and now there is the VIPS image processing library for writing out a massive set of image tiles.
Hence it is possible to work with thumbnails and then render out the thing with OpenSeadragon and VIPS.
OpenSeadragon was amazing when it was a Microsoft demo a few decades ago, but time has moved on. I wonder what can be done with tilesets in HTML5 with picture tags or in SVG to present a infinitely zoomable montage.
I like your suggestion and the options for rotating and clipping images with SVG methods. I always confuse mask and clip, but, in SVG, much could be done.
For me, the starting point would be to do an SVG with thousands of images in it, to just watch my computer crash as I step up the resolution. Really I want to recreate OpenSeadragon in SVG...
Hey, if you want to do that with this software, I can't see any files you upload (it's all local processing in your web browser), so go for it.
I see that your method also uses a lot of tinting and even overlaying the original image.
Would be great though if this was adjustable via sliders!
Thank You for making this available local-/privacy-first & in-browser!
Thanks for the kind words!
Also it would a good idea to have a detail view of a sample image at 100% to show that the images are made up of other photos. Maybe even an interactive zoom window. At monitor resolutions, the full images mostly just look like smudgy photos, and not all users may be familiar with photomosiacs. Even the "view" option on the sample mosiacs does not let you see the detail of the individual tiles very well.
I'll work on that detailed sample image view too. That's a great idea - job for tomorrow.
If you want to know for sure, open your browser's dev tools, switch to the network tab, import a file and watch to see if a network request is made.
So it does not use the submitted photos as tiles, right?
Click the "Create Mosaic" button and you should see it arrange the tiles live in the best possible way to reproduce the image. The overlay is a common technique people use to make the main image more visible. It's a personal preference thing.
Generally, the more diverse or colours you select for your tile images, the more clear and "good" the main mosaic image will be
Funnily enough I also made a universal file converter app which could do it for you on other platforms. Its at https://howtoconvert.co