My wife likes to scrapbook and I have spent a good deal of time helping her, especially with the pictures. I've always thought that a good introductory image to a scrapbook theme would be a mosaic image, but it is difficult to make a good mosaic from just personal pictures. And making it from other pictures makes it lose that personal feeling. Most scrapbook pages use embellishments of some types including little sayings and words related to the theme. So I thought a good way to make a personal mosaic would be from words rather than pictures. I looked around and found this application. It was originally just for PC, but now there is a version for the Mac and I've really started giving it a workout.

I can compose text that has meaning to the subject of the picture. Like one image that I created was made up of the words of the Navy Hymn applied to a picture of an old friend who retired from the Navy. I used the image to develop a movie with the Navy Hymn music and a tight shot moving along with the words as they are sung and then zooming out to his image made from the words, then finally fading into his actual picture. Another image was a bride and groom made from the Biblical passage on love that was read at their wedding. It makes for a very personal and artistic image.

The program is very stable and pretty quick. I'm working on a nine-year-old PowerPC Mac with 1.5 gigabytes of memory and Mac OS X 10.4. I'm surprised how quickly it can create an image on that old hardware. I'd love to see how quick it is on modern hardware.

I really haven't been able to explore all the possibilities for the settings and what they mean to the final image. There are lots of choices. The presets are helpful, but there are lots of settings and combinations of settings to explore. I think the images that it creates will be a staple of my wife's scrapbooks and maybe in some of my movies.