AndreaMosaic is a free application designed to produce photo mosaics. Photo mosaics are images that are made up of lots of other individual photos and if you look very closely at these types of images you can make out the many different small pictures.
Highlights of AndreaMosaic
AndreaMosaic is a pretty easy to use application, with some attractive features.
- Free to download and use
- Available for Windows, OS X and Linux
- A good range of preset tile patterns to choose from
- Preset output sizes up to six feet with option to set custom size
- Select from preset tile quantities or specify your own
- Save images used for tiles in archives for quick resuse in other mosaics
- Extract images for tiles from a video
Why Use AndreaMosaic
Obviously this is only going to be of interest to users who want to produce photo mosaics. However having installed this application in order to try it out purely for this article, I've found it strangely addictive. It can be a fun way to give new life to a favorite photo or make a simple picture a little more interesting.
There are some online options for producing photo mosaics, but the great advantage of a desktop application for this purpose is that you don't have to upload the photos that are to be used for the tiles. As you ideally need several hundred photos, if not thousands, this can save a lot of time. It also means that you can use larger original files which can give you the option to output the final image at larger sizes.
With the ability to save archives of photos to be used for tiles, you can also select photos from many different folders and save these to an archive. If you want to use these photos for tiles again, you just have to select the archive file and AndreaMosaic will find all the photos automatically.
There is a Professional version of AndreaMosaic that allows the production of larger mosaics, but it's hard to imagine many users ever exceeding the size constraints of the free version with its maximum of 30,000 tiles and 200 megapixel filesize. Still the option is there if you need to produce something really large.
Limitations of AndreaMosaic
Admittedly I've only used AndreaMosaic for a short period of time, but I've not really been able to find any significant limitations. The software appears to contain a good degree of user customization to achieve a variety of results, with different tile patterns and selectable output sizes.
I think even someone who was producing photo mosaics regularly at a professional level would be able to use AndreaMosaic quite happily and produce good results. Possibly someone with more experience could comment on how quick AndreaMosaic really is in producing its photo mosaics, but it seemed quite acceptable to me.
Help and Support
I personally found AndreaMosaic very intuitive and straight forward to use, but you will find after installing the software that the installation folder contains a 31 page PDF user manual. This should cover all that you need to know, though if you prefer to use tutorials as a way to learn a new application, you can select from a range of basic and advanced tutorials on the developer's website. The website also has a small forum and, while not especially lively, the developer appears to respond promptly to questions posted there, so should you have an undocumented question, you will probably be able to find support.
You can download your own free copy of AndreaMosaic from AndreaPlanet.com.