MacOSaiX2.1

Name: MacOSaiX
Rating: 3.7361 (3 reviews)

27 January 2009

Apply mosaic tile effects to images.

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Overview

MacOSaiX allows you to automatically create mosaics from images. Images can be automatically discovered from the following types of sources:

Local folders
Image randomly generated from the fonts on your computer
Google Image Search
Yahoo's flickr photo-sharing service
iPhoto albums or keywords
QuickTime movies

It's as easy as... 1,2,3:

Choose the image you want to make a mosaic from.
Choose the shape and number of tiles in the mosaic.
Choose the sources of images to use for the tiles.

What's new in MacOSaiX

Version 2.1:

New Features:

Added an iTunes album artwork image source.
Added a Delicious Library image source.
flickr image sources can now search using flickr groups.
Google image sources can now search for news or face images.
Google image sources can now search the database of LIFE images.
Support for transparency:

in original images
in images placed in tiles
in images created by the Glyphs image source
when saving a mosaic as JPG, PNG or TIFF

Now showing how well the mosaic matches the original image.
Mosaics made with small numbers of images now look better.
Image sources can now report errors when finding images.
Images can now be repeated in adjacent tiles.
Mosaics can now be as small as one tile by one tile.

Performance Improvements:

Now taking better advantage of Macs with multiple CPUs/cores.
Mosaics that allow image repeats are now created much faster.
Images are now pulled from QuickTime movies much faster.
Can now save images at larger sizes.
Improved handling of very large images from sources.

Bugs Fixed:

The image usage rules (repeats, distance apart) are now always honored.
CMYK images are now handled correctly.
No longer crashing when iPhoto is not installed.
No longer crashing when Google becomes inaccessible.
No longer stopping after finding 21 Google images.
No longer crashing when an image source is added to a mosaic with no original image.

28 Reviews of MacOSaiX

AMAZING. I don't know how this works, but it's great. It takes a long time, but "you can't rush art". This is an amazing app, and for free too!! Great tutorial by the way. Seriously, this program is excellent, thank you.

(1)

v2.1 Still works on Mac OS x 10. 8 (Mtn Lion). crashed once, maybe because i was fiddling with settings while app was working... But then it did fine on a 40x40 tile image. The STANDOUT UNIQUE FEATURE of MacOSaiX continues to be hexagonal tiles - using a 4:3 tile aspect ratio, i get a far better, more forgiving "crop" of my source images. The app does not need to create a "library" of images; you simply direct it to any folder or internet search/source for source images. I used MacOSaiX in MacOS 10.6.8 to make a poster 5ft x 7ft poster - thousands of source images, 10s of MB output file, no problem - just took several hours to complete on a 2010 iMac. Do a couple small experiments; Set it up to run the way you want, then go to bed!

(0)

EndoLab

10 December 2011

Version: 2.1

This app is very good. Never had a crash. And it’s still under development. There is a new beta–but stable–version (2.2b2) on their website. http://web.me.com/knarf/MacOSaiX/Download.html

Show comments (2)

I hope the author reads this. This can be a great app. On my MacPro, (10.6.8) it crashes after 30-40% done. I have no way to tell why, new machine 12GB memory, and crash screen is Greek to me. On my G4 MDD 1.42 running just Leo, it's now at 85% finished. No issue with speed, so long as it completes I'll be happy, and so far it looks good. The way it functions is the way it should, i.e. choosing picture folder, and main image, etc, fix the crashing and I'd recommend as a paid app. You want to see the crash report? I'm happy to crash it and send you a copy. This isn't a program I'd use often, but it's great to make a poster sized image for a party and that's exactly why I wanted a photomosaic app.

Crashy junk. Mozodojo also crashes every day but at least it did manage to successfully create 4 out of 25 mosaics. This software makes the world worse just by existing. Fail! (The only tool like this I have found which does not crash is Mazaika.)

This app crashes every time I try to open it....just after the start...loved this one years ago, but now it seem that the developer doesn't follow this project anymore...OSX 10.4.11 on powerbook

Bumps a few times in the Dock and than crashes. Mac OS X.5 Leopard 10.5.0

I've been using this since the first beta. Great Application. Not only that but you have continued development. Thank you.

If you don't love this app to heck, you're crazy. Aside from a couple slow parts where it looks like it's frozen, you aren't human if you don't like this!

This is one great app! It's slow, but I guess you can expect that when it is working with 2000+ photos. great features, and it's still being developed! Can't wait till it's out of alpha. I even used this for the title page of the school yearbook!

EXCELLENT application!! A lot of fun placing pictures from one's own photo library, the internet, and even movies (either home made or theatrically released) onto favourite photos, mosaic style. For amateur or professional use. Great stuff!

This program would be nice if it didn't crash after a long period of working on my powerbook, AND even better if it could cache the images it finds and remember their patterns, etc., so as to be quicker in gathering them for other images :-)

Why does this program try to connect to 17.250.248.34 every time I start it up? Otherwise it is a nice program after blocking it from connecting to that IP.

Show comment (1)

The latest version is much improved, especially in the speed of the UI. It still has it's bugs but it is a alpha after all. I put together a tutorial on making mosaics with MacOSaiX you might be interested in.

I would recommend to all people having trouble with this app to try 2 things. First of all, I have tried both 1.0.1 and the new alpha. According to his web site, there seems to be a beta out, but i have emailed him and given my kudos. Hopefully he will release something further soon. I tried running a movie through it, and that worked at the beginning, and then stopped. I don't know what settings he is using, but a better way I found was to go into quicktime pro or a similar app that lets you export quicktime, and export your movie to "Multiple Images" or some such. Set the rate to somewhere around 1 frame per second, and then export it to a folder. Then AFTER that is done, point MacOSaic at that folder, assign a picture to do, and BAM it worked 100% for me. I have to say, I used about 2 hours of video convered that way, came out to a little over 7000 pictures. The program used about 3000 of them at the end, but it was stable and fast. I think what is failing is the quicktime component. Using something that is single purposed for that worked great. Thank you for this wonderful program. -Rob

Haven't been able to figure out how to use this with images from the internet.....iphoto library is OK if you have lots of pics for it to use. Has some potential cool to it. But could use a help menu. Shareware is a real possibility. Definitely worth a serious look.

Please, before being at all confused as to what this new *ALPHA* (it IS alpha 1, of course it crashes) can or can't do, visit the website the author has kindly maintained and get the skinny. Learn what not to do through trial and error. And what ever happened to bug reports?

For an alpha release, I'm impressed. So much so that I've written the author to suggest that releasing it as "donationware" might be a good idea. I also offered to make the first donation, as I firmly believe in supporting our Mac shareware/freeware/whateverware authors. Now, having said that, it is an unstable release. Exporting images takes a very long time and the new release won't import projects from the previous release. It's not possible to add sources once the processing has started and I really miss the google image capabilities. The UI isn't as intuitive as I've come to expect from mac applications, but again, for an alpha release, I think it's a fantastic start. This is one app I'm going to be watching for updates to!

This app is the most unpredictable and unstable app I've ever tried to use. It randomally quits, pauses itself, goes idle, etc... Definely cool, but needs help in the QA department.

LOVE THIS APP!!! I have been using this for a while now . . . click below for a sample I made: http://homepage.mac.com/apolloer04/Personal16.html Apollo Reyes

Seems like a great app overall -- I've heard comments about instability under Panther, but it works fine for me, just won't close while searching images. I love the Google feature, but it's limiting me to 20 images per search term! Is this fixable? Anyone know?

Does what it says, but needs an awful lot of pictures. Fortunately you can connect to Google to get pictures from there. Works very fine, but is not very fast. Get a lots of pictures and let the program do the job!

MacOSaiX is a very cool tool for producing photomosaics of a photo from various image sources. One of the nicest features is the ability to enter "Google" search terms, and have it find matching images on the web. The interface is very nice (Aqua) with most of the features you would expect or want. Two notable deficiencies are that there is no way to exclude an image source once you start making the image, and there is no way to exclude a particular image (you can change the image of any particular tile, but if the image you replace is "useful", it will pop up somewhere else. Given that Google might turn up some images you don't want in your final result, this is can be annoying. The only serious problem with the program is that it appears to hang periodically (on a TiBook 550 running 10.2.5, at least). Given that it checkpoints, this isn't fatal, but it takes a while to figure out that it's never coming back.

MacOSaiX2.1

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What's new in MacOSaiX

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28 Reviews of MacOSaiX

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