I have just started using your program and as a software engineer myself, I must say, "Well Done!"

I am looking at creating a mosaic of each of my children. The mosaics will be made of pictures of my extended family, the kids, grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles and etc. Kind of a message that we are all a sum of our families.

I have a very large stock of family photos. They are organized into folders by date. Because of this, it appears that the older files are added to the tile archive before the more recent pictures. When the mosaics are created, most of the pictures used in the mosaic are the older ones.

Is there a way to prioritize the order in which images are selected for the mosaic so that if two images work equally well for a tile, one has a priority over the other? Perhaps by the order they are added to the archive or in some other way?

Thanks

Oh, I have noticed in other posts that you seem to know of an available image collection. Information on that would be greatly appreciated.

Troy

Hello Troy,

Sorry for the late answer, was quite busy lately. Actually there is no way to prioritize an image, but this is can be a interesting feature. In other words the possibility to have a collection of images with a lower priority.

Actually in the Select Tiles window you have "Include Folders" and "Required Folders" (and Exclude Folders). I would add another "Low Priority Folders" where you can put images that will be used only if they fit really well, if no other good images are available in the "Include Folders".

Anyone has a comment about this idea?

byee
Andrea

Andrea, a suggestion, if I may: Perhaps each folder could be assigned a priority, from 1 to 9, 5 as default? I don't know the internal workings of AndreaMosaic ... but maybe if there's some of prioritizing system, it could look at the 9s for 1/9th of the tiles; the 8s and 9s for 1/9th of the tile; the 7s 8s and 9s for 1/9th of the tiles; the 6s 7s 8s 9s for 1/9th of the tiles, etc.


To the original poster: There's an interim workaround, if there's some extra hard drive space -- feed it more copies of your newer photos, and give it a different name.

For example, all my photos are arranged chronogically, such as 081207-New mosaic.

If I wanted to give preference to 2008 photos, and if AndreaMosaic is picking up on photos based on filename as you suggest:
-- Make a new folder called 00000000. This should be the first thing in the list, then.
-- Select all your folders from 2008. Copy them onto the clipboard (control-C in Windows).
-- Go into your 00000000 folder. Paste 'em into that folder.
-- Add the bunch to your collection.
-- After you're done with the mosaic, delete your old folder.

If the software is giving preference to some file names, this may work around the problem. Either way, it also gives you twice the chance to get the same photos in.

The obvious problem: You can easily repeat photos side-by-side regardless of the settings.

Yes, making different copies of your images will help somewhat because you allow more duplications for them. But this is not enough.

Giving a different priority is not difficult because I just raise/lower the score for images with higher/lower priority when choosing which tile to use. Maybe 1 to 9 different priorities for each folder is too much complicated for the common end user. A solution like "Important folders", "Generic Folders" is easier to understand. Something like

Required Folders - maximum score they will be used in any case
High desired / Important Folders
Normal Folders
Not Important Folders

Exclude Folders

Any suggestion for the names is welcome
Andrea

Thanks for this thread - it might explain why the mosaic I'm working on is composed of far too many pictures of one group, and is not balanced between my folders. I'll try a few of the ideas posted to fix my problem.

For the mosaic I'm working on I'd like an even mix of pictures irrespective of how many folders there are, or what the file names are.

I assume for speed issues AndreaMosaic finds the first tile it can acceptably use as a match for each space, so perhaps some way of changing the order of search each time when tile matching will be useful.

Obviously I do not know how AndreaMosiac performs its search, but if AndreaMosaic creates some sort of tree or hash structure to allow for quick lookup of tiles via a coding system, I think that:

If this is initially created by going through each tile in name and/or folder order, tiles earlier in the order will always be placed in the structure first, allowing quick access, with later tiles being placed deeper in the structure, and therefore less likely to be accessed.

eg
If I have two tiles which produce exactly the same code (ie because they look very similar), then the earlier one in the list will be placed in the structure first, and the later one will perhaps be placed in a linked list behind it.

When searching for matches of that code, then the earlier tile will be accessed first, deemed to be a match and then used in the mosaic. To look for the later tile would require more checks (inefficient) and would not add any value to the [overall] image.

Of course, by not allowing duplicates you could then force the program to look in later searchs to later tiles in the linked lists or deeper in the structures, but say if you had numerous tiles of the same code, then in this case you would match many more of the earlier pictures before you got to use a later tile match.



Another item to mention is that if we allow alterations to tiles for a better result, will AndreaMosaic try to look for a perfect or as close a match possible first, or will any tiles within the acceptable range be accepted first? I could imagine if a tree structure is used, finding acceptable tiles rather than perfect tiles (to improve speed) would happen a lot. Again, tiles entered into the structure first would dominate as many of them will be accessed early and deemed acceptable.



If my thoughts do correspond to AndreaMosaics workings in some way, the obvious solution is to randomise the order in which pictures are added to the data structures.

Perhaps if people find their mosaics aren't quite as they wished they could have an option to rebuild the structure using a new random order, such that they can try again with hoepfully better results.
I doubt the rebuild option would add much in terms of quality, but the initial random creation of the structure surely would.

Well, that's if AndreaMosaic works in this kind of way of course!


Ps As for my idea about palettes earlier in another thread, I now think that each tile set should simply display its own palette, rather than show a normal palette and its matches. If a palette is mostly of red shades, I think everyone could tell there are mostly red tiles!

AndreaMosaic analyze all images. There is no first look. And the best one are chosen regardless of the folder where it is located. Only if two images produces exactly the same "score" then the first one is selected but this is rare to happen except the two images are the same.

Using a Folder Priority system it is possible to give more weight to some folders than to others.

But what you want is something different, you want that it choose automatically an equal number of files from each folder.

I'm thinking about how to accomplish this...

No need to design something that will choose an equal number of files from each folder - if the best one (ignoring any color asjustments allowed etc) is always chosen then I will just need to change my overall picture or improve my image collection to get better results.

Yes, the best image is always chosen regardless of the file folder / location / file name.

I know this is a somewhat older discussion, but I registered today to make this exact same feature request. I made my first mosaic recently, and your program did all of the hard work for me (By the way......thank you so very much for such a great program). The hard work that I did though was going through all of my digital photos and "culling" out the pictures that had less relevance. For instance, a picture of the countryside in Ireland may have great relevance in a gallery of pictures from Ireland, but it has much less meaning being seen on its own--as a small tile in a mosaic, it might just be a green and blue blob. Anyway, I went though all of our pictures and tried to find ones with the most relevance, and I even scanned some that were in picture frames. Some of our pictures mean more than others, so it would be a really nice feature to have a way to force the program to use some pictures, give a higher weight to others, and then use other ones only if needed.

Hi Pole,

1. make two folders, one with important images and the other with fill images.
2. when you create the collection add the folder with important images to the required folder list (for example 500 images).
3. add the fill image folders to the default folder list (for example 5000 images).
4. create a mosaic with a good number of tiles, for example 2000 tiles. Doing so you will be sure that all 500 important images will be used at least once. The fill images will be used if they match well the colors.

byee
Andrea

Thank you Andrea.........I must be getting slow in my old age because it took me a few minutes to find it. There's a drop down list for designating folders as to priority. In the old days, I would have found it myself.

Once again, great program.

Ok, this thread is only two years old, but I still have a related feature request...

I have a similar collection of files -- hundreds (maybe thousands) of folders, some of which have many pictures in them. My problem is that I don't want to spend the time to include/exclude each folder, or prioritize individual folders; I simply want a mechanism to ensure that photos are more evenly distributed across the folders.

I think there is an easy way to do this... can there be something similar to Tile Duplication but instead at the folder level? I want no two photos from the same folder within some distance of each other.

This would help on sections of photographs that are similar all having similar but not identical photos... i.e. white sections all from the same wedding (bride's dress), skin tones all from the same beach shots, or something like that.

I do realize that there is a "Custom Tile Variants" option, but that requires renaming each similar file... I simply don't have the time to do that renaming work on 100,000 photos! But I think if you already have code in the software that does it it could easily be reused the way I'm describing -- just ignore the naming convention (the three underscores) and have a checkbox that uses the folder path ONLY for the minimum distance.

Let me know, that would be helpful for the problems I'm seeing in my mosaics with similar image duplication in areas of consistent color.

Many thanks!
---Chip Lynch

This feature will be available in the next beta release