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Photomosaic using Pixelize in Ubuntu

For the past couple of days I have been looking for a tool to make photomosaics in Ubuntu. The first one I tried to use was Metapixel, but I could not get it to install in Ubuntu. Then I came across Pixelize.

The good news is that pixelize is in the Feisty Fawn repos. The bad news is that pixelize will crash and appear broken upon first use. This is in part due to the extremely sparse documentation, which does not explain that if you get the crash behaviour then you need to issue the make_db command manually in order to create a data-base of the images that will be used to make the photomosaic.

So here are some instructions on how to get pixelize to work in Feisty:

Step 1 - Install

Now you will need to manually create a db file of all the images in your folder by using the make_db command. So open the terminal, and issue this command:

sudo apt-get install pixelize

Step 2 - Images

The more photos or images you have the better the outcome. I have about 2500 photos and the results have been quite acceptable, but there is room for improvement which would require more images.

Place all your images in one folder.

Step 3 - make_db

make_db [path to your image folder]

In my case: make_db /media/disk/pics/*

Now depending on how many images you have this may take a while as all images are indexed.

That's it, now you can launch pixelize from the terminal using, you guess it, pixelize.

Screenshots:

The main window:

File > Open:
Navigate to your image folder and select the image you want to turn into a photomosaic.

I have selected this random image:

Then go to Options > Options:
Here you can play around with the settings to get the best outcome, you will have to experiment with this.

Once you are ready, click on Options > Render and wait. The outcome should looks something like this:

Enjoy.