National Geographic's Infinite Photograph will mesmerize you

National Geographic has a fun new feature called the Infinite Photograph that takes over 300,000 photos collected from its archives and submitted by users, and turns them into a giant photo mosaic. It lets you zoom in infinitely, making your way deeper into each photo as it breaks down into smaller photos of various colors.

The service is the latest effort to promote the company's MyShot program, which showcases user-uploaded photographs that appear both online and in the monthly publication.

Early Thursday I spoke with Rob Covey, who is National Geographic's senior vice president of content and design, about the project that he says is just the beginning of something much larger. "This is Version 1.0 of it. We've got a lot more work to do," he said. Covey said while this iteration is focused on a general selection of photos of Earth, future versions will break down into verticals like water, trees, and animals.

However, before it hits that point, Covey says there's some tweaking to be done in the back end, which was written entirely in-house and by one developer. As of right now, the application takes about a minute and a half to load in your browser--maybe a bit too long for some to wait. Future iterations will display higher quality pictures, and stream in faster from the get-go.

What's interesting here is that National Geographic is using the same editorial vetting for user-submitted photos as it does for its magazine, which means all of the shots you see are gorgeous. It's also harder to get your shot in, since it goes through a strict editorial review process. Covey says that there have been some 50,000 user-submitted images that have been contributed, and that the more they get into the system, the more advanced the application can get with its color sampling.

For those who want to get a similar experience with their own photos there's the Image Mosaic Generator, which will create a mosaic out of uploaded photos using shots from Flickr. However, it does not let you zoom in to see the full quality version of each shot, or have a neat Flash-based browser like National Geographic does.

[tipoo_]

Wow, that was impressive!

[W1gglesnarf]

wish i could see it =/

[sythara]

you must be using Safari.


j/k

[Chapmaniac]

Wait - Safari can't play a simple flash YouTube "video?"

[d3vildog69]

I can't see it either... but thats cause websense is on :p

yes im using safari

[Breezy1601]

Not that big a deal, really but clever. It just re-grids photos based on overall color/shade every time you zoom in, thus the illusion of constantly drilling down, into multiple layers. In reality you're just rearranging the grid based on color/hue/intensity with any zoom in point once your images have gotten small enough to be just shades.

This little trick will be copied by everyone soon. It's a great bit of outside the box thinking.

[andres_cor22]

It would be awesome the same effect but backwards... getting out of the picture and building another one surrounded it.

[blish]

that's a lot of frogs!

[lee4646]

umm. this is far from new. we did this on kodak.com over 10 years ago. And the Flashpix file format is just what this is used for, and Flashpix file format is already (sadly) obsolete.

And there is a major infringement of Rob Silver's patent on Photomosaics. NG, you really ought to know this. And you shoulda done your research on photography before claiming credit, whether it was one developer or 100.