I recently discovered metapixel, a tool for making photomosaics - it takes a single source image, slices it up, and replaces each piece with a similar image from a larger gallery of images. So you end up with a version of the source image that is composed entirely of smaller images.

The resulting images are very cool, because unlike most digital images, they actually have higher resolution at lower sizes. When zoomed out, or seen far away, they appear to be very close to the original image. But as you get closer, the smaller images become apparent, and you start to lose sight of the larger picture.

I use Amarok to manage and play my music collection, and it has stored the cover artwork for nearly every album I own. So I had the idea to use metapixel to make photomosaics of album covers, using the entire cover collection as the gallery.

I won't get into the technical details much here (perhaps I'll post later on code in the ruins), but I'll post some of the results. It turned out pretty well, I think. Click on the thumbnails for the full images (note: they are fairly large: 7 to 24 MB).

Any requests? Let me know.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 30th, 2007 at 11:22 am and is filed under Entertainment and culture, Science and technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.