I'm trying AndreaMosaic for the first time and am still learning its characteristics. I do have a couple of questions already.

(I'm using a collection file with about 120 photos, both portrait and landscape format, mostly color, but a few black-and-white ones. For the photomosaic I'm using a color portrait of a face.)

1. I've had quite a few lockups. I gather from the forum discussions that I may just need to learn what parameters work best. So I'm hoping that will resolve itself.

2. I get some mosaics with one black-and-white photo tile repeating apparently randomly throughout the picture, in color areas where it is quite out of place. When this happened the first time, I removed the offending photo from the collection file, but the program simply picked another one and did the same with it.

3. Finally, I frequently get mosaics with lots and lots of black areas and only scattered patches of appropriate photo tiles.

I will appreciate any help, as I'm enthused about the program and most of the results I get with it.

You have to change the parameter: minimum distance between duplicated tiles. And also duplicated count parameter. Don't use too high values else you get black tiles. But if you use too low values some tiles are too much repeated.