PhotoMosaique from Antonio Da Cruz (FreeWare)
PhotoMosaique is a small but elegant unitility allowing to create picture mosaiques very quickly and very easily. The final image is
made of a thousand tiny images (thumbails). Unlike other similar softwares PhotoMosaique allows you to obtain a good result using very few thumbnails. However an optimum result requires big pictures and it is rather difficult to visualize the final result on the screen, this software is therefore intended more for printing.
Downloading of the application is available at the download link for the English version and for the French version.
The Main menu of the application consists of five options: File, Edit, Action, Options and ?.
The option File opens a File Dialog popup. It has options Open… for image file opening, Save As… for saving the result image to a disk and Close for closing files. The File popup also supports a list of recently opened files and has the option Exit for canceling the program execution and quitting the application.
The utility supports a lot of commonly used image formats including Bitmap, JPEG, Paintbrush, Adobe Photoshop, PNG, Windows MetaFile, Targa, GIF, TIFF and ICO, as well as Portable Map (*.pbm, *.pqm, *.ppm), SGI (*.bw, *.rgb, *.rgba, *sgi), Dr.Halo (*.cut), Alias/Wavefront (*.rla, *rpf), Autodesk (*.cel, *.pic), and the native image formats for the creator of the utility - PhotoFiltre Image (*.pfi) and PhotoFiltre Selection (*.pfs).
The option Edit opens Edit Dialog containing standard editing options Copy, Paste and Cancel (fo cancelling the operation).
The option Action opens a popup with three options: Create the mosaic, Image size… and Print…. With the option Create the mosaic one can create a mosaic using the original image as a template and thumbnails in the Thumbnails directory of the program as elementary pictures of the mosaic. The resulting image replaces the original image at the Main window of the application. With the option Image size… it is possible to adjust the size of the resulting image in pixels and enable/disable anti-aliasing* and preserving aspect ratio. After making adjustments you can save them by pushing the button OK or cancel them by pushing the button Annuler (which stands for English Cancel 
). The option Print allows to get a hard copy of the image. It opens a window of the Print Manager in which you could set printing options and start the proccess of printing.
The option Options opens the Options popup containing checkable options Check size and Antialias, the option Thumbnails folder…, allowing to set the Thumbnails folder of the program; and the option Unit, which opens a small sub-popup of image size units (cm or inches).
You could use your own thumbnail images for creating mosaics. The Thumbnails folder contains 40×40 pixel images in the format JPEG, PNG, BMP or GIF. You can replace these images by your own, you can add or substract images. The size of the thumbnail images can be from 10-15 pixels 40 pixels.
If you set the option Check size then the program automatically enlarge the resulting image if it is too small in the process of creating the mosaic. This enlargement goes according the following table:
| Thumbnail Size | Automatic Size | Optimum Size |
| 10 | 800 | 1200 |
| 15 | 1200 | 1800 |
| 20 | 1600 | 2400 |
| 40 | 3200 | 4800 |
The automatically calculated size is a minimum value, it is often better to enlarge the image
manually for an optimum result.
* Anti-aliasing (source: en.wikipedia.org)
In digital signal processing, anti-aliasing is the technique of minimizing aliasing (jagged or blocky patterns) when representing a high-resolution signal at a lower resolution.
In most cases, anti-aliasing means removing data at too high a frequency to represent. When sampling is performed without removing this part of the signal, it causes undesirable artifacts.
In signal acquisition, this is often done using an analog anti-aliasing filter to remove the out-of-band component of the input signal prior to sampling with an analog-to-digital converter.
The option ? of the Main menu opens a small popup with three options: Information (opens a simple Help-file in text format), Official web-site, and standard option About with some information about the developer of the program.