mozaiq is an image play-ground. We're collecting some of the finest, freely licensed photographs we can from the web and displaying them for the world to work with.
We've also got a lot more in the works. Keep checking back for more features.
Anything you want! We provide tools to help you find the best, freely available photos around. All of the photographs we index are availabe under some form of the Creative Commons license.
To help us determine which photographs are the best, we have created our moderation tool. To help you find the best photos around, check out our browse page.
We recommend checking out our moderation tool. It's really more of a game and is a fun and easy way to explore the variety of imagery available.
A photo mosaic is a single image composed of many smaller images. Usually, the many smaller images are arrange in such a way as to give the illusion that a larger overall image is visible when seen from a distance.
There is an article on Wikipedia that provides more infomation.
Start on our front page. From there, all you need to do is upload a picture off of your computer with which you want to make a mosaic. We accept any jpeg, png, or gif image that is smaller than 512KB.
After uploading an image, you will be brought to a page that allows you to set a few simple options. All options have default values and can be left alone if you like.
The basic options are fairly straight forward: a title, your name, and whether you want the mosaic to be in color or black & white. We recommend, at minimum, filling in both your name and a title.
The advanced options work to control the resulting quality of the mosaic. The default settings work well in most cases. Quality can be judged by a variety of different factors and it is important, if you are going to change these settings, that you understand what they do.
It is important that you select "Black & White" in the basic settings when you create your mosaic. If you don't, we will try to use our full library of images, color and black & white, to create your mosaic. There are times when a color image, such as a pale blue image or a tan image, matches better than any of the black & white images we have available. Selecting "Black & White" in the basic settings avoids this situation.
One of the most unpleasant things to see in a photo mosaic is repeating images. While they are tolerable in small amounts, often times it is simply distracting.
"Randomness" allows mozaiq to select not just the best tile for an area, but a number of the best tiles. It then randomly chooses between those tiles when it comes time to draw the mosaic. A larger "randomness" value allows mozaiq to choose more tiles for each location. While this reduces the accuracy of the final product, it tends to improve visual quality.
For most images, we recommend leaving this setting around 2 or 3. If you have an image with large areas of solid color, such as a picture of a blue sky, you may want to turn this value up higher to smooth out the result.
"Source Opacity" causes mozaiq to merge a semi-transparent copy of the original image over the top of your mosaic. This tends to result in a nice level of color correction and can accent details that might other wise be blurred.
You may be thinking to yourselves "Hey! That's cheating!" Well... ok if that's the way you feel about it. We do allow you to turn the source opacity down to 0% and don't worry, the results are often quite nice. However, remember, a photo mosaic is a recreation of the source image. Depending on the image, a source opacity setting of as high as 30% or 40% may be completely invisible in the end result. It will simply provide a nice touch of color to account for any erroneous matching. We recommend a setting of 10% or 20% for most images.
Similar to "Randomness", "Neighbor Prevention Distance" reduces the number of times an image is repeated in a mosaic. Also similar to "Randomness", it will reduce overall accuracy but may improve the visual quality.
Setting this value to 0 means that a tile can be used as much as possible. In an error of solid color, that can cause a single tile to be repeated several times in a row - accurate but ugly.
Setting this value to 1 means that a tile is not allow to be repeated right in a row. It provides marginal improvements over setting it to 0. Setting this value higher still distances repeated tiles more and more, up to a maximum value of 5. We recommend setting this value as low as possible.
Neighbor prevention works well with randomness. If you don't use any randomness, you may see undesirable patterns emerge in the result. We recommend a neighbor prevention distance of 3 with a randomness of 2 or 3.
Tiles are cropped, thumbnail versions of the images that we catalogue. They are all exactly square, 300x300 versions of the image.
Tiles are licensed under the same Creative Commons license as the original photographs. This means you can do just about anything you want with the tile as long as you attribute the original photographer and mozaiq.
If you visit a tile's page here on mozaiq, you will also see a link to the original web site where the image is hosted. You will generally find a larger, uncropped version of the image there.
We are working on ways to find tiles from a variety of sources. However, at present, all tiles are graciously retrieved from Flickr.
Moderating is mozaiq's voting system. It allows the users to take control and decide what photographs are good and which are sub-par.
Well, first of all, we believe that moderating is fun and easy! We've designed to be as simple as possible and it's a great way to explore our library of photos. You will see a wide assortment of images, generally more than you would just casually browsing.
Moderating also helps everyone by selecting out the best of the best. It lets the most choice photos rise to the top of the pack so that everyone can find and enjoy them.
That's super easy! Just click the moderate link you see above.
On that page, you will be presented with two tiles — medium sized thumbnails from our index of photos. All you have to do is click the photo that you like the most. We'll record you choice and present you with two more tiles to choose between. It's that simple.
"Beauty is in th eye of the beholder," they say. We couldn't agree more. Therefore, we have created a moderation system that works on a relative scale, comparing two photos together, rather than just blindly allowing users to assign them scores. This prevents users from seeing a photo they like, rating it a 10, and then seeing another photo they like more and wishing they had only given the previous one a 9.
All tiles start with a score of 5 — a middle score between the minimum of 0 and maximum of 10. As a tile is moderated, it's score moves up or down depending on how it compares to other tiles with similar scores. We keep track of how many times a tile was moderated (total votes) as well as the number of times the tile as actually chosen (votes.)
It's worth noting that this means scores can vary quite a bit. It only takes one moderation to bump a top ranked tile down a notch or a bottom ranked tile up. We feel this is fair in that, as we said, beauty is relative so no photo should ever be treated as perfect and infallible, its score ever unchanging. Please keep this in mind when browsing — it is useful to browse over a larger range of scores than just the 10's or 0's.
When visit our tiles library by clicking the "browse" link at the top of the page, you are viewing small thumbnails all of our available images. 28 thumbnails are shown per page, and you can click "next" and "previous" to view more tiles.
Tiles are shown sorted by the score they currently have, as determined by our moderation tool. Tiles with higher scores are show first.
At the bottom of the page, there are options to reduce the number of tiles you are browsing through. You can set the minimum and maximum scores you wish to see, as well as the minimum number of times a tile must be voted on to be shown.
We have developed systems to detect problems automatically. Unfortunately, sometimes they take a little time to work. If you find a problem spot in our library, please contact us, and we will work to fix the problem as quickly as possible.
We are doing everything in our power to make sure that this site works the same for everyone. Unfortunately, that is no easy task. We have tested this site for full compatibility in Firefox, Opera, and Epiphany. Limited functionality is available in Internet Explorer 7.
There are a few known bugs with Safari and our browse page. We are working to resolve those, but have not yet come up with a solution.
Our recommendation, for best functionality across the board, is to look use . This is the browser which we develop on and it works beautifully.
Please let us know! We only collect tiles which we are told (by human or computer) are licensed properly. Sometimes we are told incorrectly and sometimes people change the licenses on their images. We will work to correct this as soon as we are able.
Send us a message on the contact page and we will work to answer you questions to the best of our ability. Thanks!