Two Fun Photo Freebies

Last summer I was fooling around with my computer and I wanted to find something where I could make a mosaic using photos. In other words put a bunch of pictures together to make one photo. I didn't find what I was looking for at the time, but I did find a collage maker, which was fine by me too.

This is from Flickr and the cool thing is you don't have to a member (I'm not) in order to use this program. It's from the Flickr Big Huge Labs site. They have a lot of fun things to do with your photos.

The first thing I did was make a collage with the many baby pictures I have. The only bad part of this program is I had to upload each photo individually and after I was finished it turns out I used a couple of the photos more than once, and --my bad-- have a picture of Carli when she was a baby. Oh well, you can kind of turn it into a "Where's Waldo?" game.

One of the fun things you can do is make a stamp (not to be used in real life, of course).

I had fun with the "Warholizer" where you can create a photo a la Andy Warhol and change the colors.

Then there is the "Hockneyizer" where you can create photos in the style of David Hockney.

In the Hockneyizer you can make it with "polaroids", and even decide how many "prints" you want to use.

There are lots of other fun things you can do on this site, even some practical things like making CD cover art or calendars and so on. So go to the Big Huge Labs site and have fun with it!

This weekend I was looking for the site again to do something with my Christmas dog photos. Since I hadn't saved the site to my favorites I had to look for it again. Before I found it I found what I had been originally looking for last summer, the mosaic picture maker. What a difference six months makes! I don't know why I couldn't find anything back then but now all of a sudden a bunch of what I was looking for showed up.

Well, not exactly what I was looking for. What I wanted was another freebie, like the Big Huge Labs site. Most of what I found for the mosaic picture making were sites that you have to pay for. But I did finally find one that is right up my alley and it works great too. The best thing is it's a free download to your computer so you don't have to be on-line while you are playing with your photos (like the Flickr site). The only catch? When you post a photo or print it you must give credit to the creator, something I have no problem with.

It is the Andrea Mosaic program. It's really easy to use. You don't have to upload each photo one at a time (unless you really want to!). You can put the photos you want to use for a particular project into a single file and then upload that file in one fell swoop. For my two mosaic photos below I just used my whole "My Pictures" so the program had just over 2000 pictures to choose from. What I would like to do eventually is take just the dog photos to create a dog portrait, or just the baby/family pictures to create a baby portrait, etc, but I just haven't taken the time to separate them into their own files yet.

Here's one of my favorite pictures of Clyde (again) in the mosaic form.

And here's one of the baby.
See how fun that is?

And finally now the one of the dogs I wanted to do: three separate photos as one (this is using the Flickr site).

Have fun with your photos!