Seeking help with mosaic software MacOSaiX

[Moof1904]

I'm creating a poster sized mosaic as a Christmas gift and have been trying to use MacOSaiX and it's giving me fits.

It gets 95% of the way to completing the mosaic and then just sits there. I've let it run for 24 hours and none of the remaining tiles are completed. When I quit and attempt to restart, I get the crash reporting dialog, suggesting that the software thinks it crashed, even though it seeming quit normally with a Quit command.

I'm using selections from my iPhoto and three QuickTime movies as source material.

Do any MacOSaiX users out there have insights on making this software behave? I love the feature set and I love that it's free, but I just wish it would complete this render so that I can get the poster to the printer.

(Running it on a Dual 2.5 with 3.5 gigs of RAM.)

 

[wwooden]

I used it a couple times and had similar problems like yours. Basically I think it comes down to the fact that you don't have enough pictures that span the spectrum of colors that the final image needs. I had over 600 pictures from my trip to Paris and I tried to make a mosaic image of the Eiffel Tower, and it would never fill up the image and I thought I had a pretty good variety of pictures and colors. Some suggestions I would is to allow it to have duplicate pictures next to each other to fill areas that have the same color. You can make the grid bigger or smaller and see if that helps. You can also add a google image search for pictures that may help. Of course, this will add pictures which are not yours, but sometimes this can add intereting pictures of something in particular. I think the best thing is just to play around with it a bit and adjust all the settings. I hope that helped.

 

[Moof1904]

Thanks for the response. I don't think the problem is caused by an insufficient image library. I have over 10,000 images available for mosaic-ing a single photo and it still hangs.

I found an amazing bit of postcardware on VersionTracker (FotoMosaic), even though it's for the PC. I installed and ran it on my work computer and used some work related images and in about 20 minutes created a fantastic mosaic image that was 24 x 36 inches at 300 dpi.

I'm going to dust off my Windoze machine that lives in a dark, unloved corner of my study at home and see if FotoMosaic can get the job done over the weekend.


Thanks again!