Photo Mosaic of 5th Third Field in Toledo — Click to see details

I recently came across a program called Andrea Mosaic which allows you to make photo mosaics out of your own photo collection. After messing around with the pictures I happen to have on my laptop, I came up with a pretty cool photo mosaic of 5th Third Field in Toledo (from my minor league excursion last July) which is now my current desktop background. I set it up to use only baseball related photos, which includes ballgames I’ve been to, pictures from Cooperstown, and action shots from the batting cages we went to during Jenn’s bachelorette party. If you’ve been to a ball game with me in the past two years, chances are you’re in there somewhere. Overall, I’m pretty impressed with it — for comparison, the original image is here. I can’t explain why it likes the Red Sox logo so much, but refuses to use the Twins logo at all — I had both in the collection, I swear.

A few warnings if you want to try it yourself… you need a fairly large image collection if you want to make a good mosaic (or in some cases, if you want the algorithm to find an appropriate set of images at all). You can help that a little by allowing it to rotate, flip, and “alter” the images (which I think it does by changing the brightness and/or tint) and there’s also a neat extension which allows you to use frames from .avi files. (Unfortunately, it doesn’t clarify which codec and it’s clearly not all of them since it wouldn’t let me use a video Amrys took of Fenway.) It’s also a huge memory and CPU hog, and can take 20 minutes or more to complete, so don’t expect to multi-task too much while you’re playing around. But it’s a fun tool to waste time with.