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.
Want to emulate that neat collage look you get when you get photos printed out? There's a service called Collagr that does it for you pulling in photos from Flickr. If you've got shots on there, just fill in your username and Collagr will do its magic. The result is a square array that may look a little small in the preview, but if you save it to your hard drive you'll notice it's 1,400x1,025, which is larger than the average desktop wallpaper. The recommended use, however, is for MySpace profiles--you know, the kind that are nearly impossible to read.
Collagr is working on adding other photo-hosting services, and hopefully a way to grab entire sets, too. Ideally, I'd like to see these guys come together with custom sizes, and a drag-and-drop interface that lets you put together your own contact sheets.
Here's an example I got from one of my favorite Flickr users, Ulterior Epicure--also known as the guy who posts nothing but pictures of gourmet food.
Related: Two Flickr eye-candy tools for your Monday
The end result is a simple collage of images, taken straight from any Flickr user.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
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Here's a mosaic we put together using Image Mosaic Generator and the Webware 100 logo.
The Flickr API has opened up a lot of fun tools over the years. This morning we got a tip about Image Mosaic Generator, a free service that creates neat-looking picture mosaics of uploaded images. The service uses Flickr images to make up each mosaic and lets users save the end result to their hard drive. Images have a fair bit of variation, although you're likely to see a few repeats close up. The service doesn't link back to the original Flickr images, which is a bit disappointing, but as a result, handles the conversion from image to mosaic in just a few minutes.
This is by no means one of the first tools to do this, but one of the simplest Web-based ones I've run into. Also worth checking out if you're playing around with Adobe's Apollo runtime, is Developer Derrick Grigg's mosaic creator, which lets you use Flickr shots that match search criteria. This could come in handy if you have a beach picture, as you could run it through the tool using public photos related to beaches.
Flickrvision shows you newly geotagged shots on Flickr using a Google Map.
(Credit: CNET Networks)The one thing these Web-based services still can't do is pull local photos on your hard drive to make up the mosaic, something that's not easily accomplished without software and a hefty photo library.
Flickrvision is a fun mashup that shows you real-time photos people have geotagged on Flickr using a Google Map. Mousing over them will display a larger preview and information about the shot in a lightbox pop-up. You can also click the thumbnail to go straight to the original shot.
Flickrvision was created by the same developer who made Twittervision, a similar service that shows the latest Twitter posts and where they originated from.
Flickr has its own mashup of geotagged photos, although it doesn't show real-time results like Flickrvision does.
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