PhotoMosaique is an Efficient Portable Photographic Mosaic Creator

Photographic Mosaic is a Photograph that consists of a large number of rectangular sections each of which contains images that matches the target photograph. PhotoMosaique is a easy to use but efficient free, portable software that can quickly form high-quality photographic mosaics. According to the developer:

PhotoMosaique facilitates very easy and fast creation of picture mosaics. The final image comprises about a thousand tiny images (thumbnails). But, unlike other software, PhotoMosaique allows you to obtain a good result using very few pictures. However, an optimum result requires big pictures, so, with the monitor, it is inherently rather difficult to visualize the result obtained. The software is therefore intended more for printing.

Features & Specifications

PhotoMosaique is distributed as a Zip archive [PhotoMosaique-en.zip ; 1,099Kb] containing the files required to run the software. The software is portable, means it do not requires installation or extraction to temp directory for its function. The main executable [PhotoMosaique.exe ; 1,725 Kb] is not digitally signed.
The software has an easy to understand interface. You can open an image by browsing for it or just dragging and dropping on it. It also keeps a history of recently opened images that is available via file menu. It also allows you to copy opened images or created collages without even without saving it and paste an image other than saving it.

Main GUI

The software supports anti-aliasing, which is a method of fooling the eye that a jagged edge is really smooth. This way the created mosaic is of good quality.
The software comes with a folder filled with 83 Thumbnails for creation of the mosaic. That folder is the default thumbnail folder of PhotoMosaique. You can of course browse for another folder containing thumbnails. Like that said in the developers description, PhotoMosaique indeed gives better result with small number of thumbnails. With more thumbnails often the software become non-responsive. I tried to make Photographic collage using the default thumbnail folder containing 83 images and with a custom thumbnail folder containing 4,446 images. I got better result with smaller number of images.

Mosaic Creation with small and large number of Thumbnails

You can manage the pixels of the thumbnails. By default it is set to 10 Pixels but can be changed to 15, 20 and 40 pixels. You can check which pixel is giving you better result. In my experience the default settings is good enough. If you want to print your final image on a full A4 sheet, use 40 pixel thumbnails, the result will be the best quality.
PhotoMosaique auto changes the display of the opened image. It is always better to change it to maximum zoom (400%) for better result.
You will be able to set the size of the output image.

Output Image Size

The software allows you to save the image in JPG/JPEG, BMP, GIF, PNG, TIF/TIFF, RLE, TGA formats. Default format is JPEG. You will be able to manage the compression of the output image while saving in JPEG format.

JPEG Compression

PhotoMosaique allows you to take a print of the created Photographic Mosaic.

Print Options

The software gives best result with images with few details (still life, portrait, country-side etc).
The software uses little RAM (around 10 Mb) all the time. CPU usage goes around 30% while forming the mosaic.
Offline help documentation is available describing the usage of the software.

My Verdict

The software was last updated on more than six years back (May 2006), still it works great on Windows 7 64 bit as well as 32 bit. Obviously it will work on older versions of Windows. No system requirements have been mentioned in the website. the software requires you to have a PC with 256 Mb RAM but I personally experienced that it requires a maximum of 30Mb Free RAM. Powerful CPU will give you faster conversion.
I really liked this portable Photographic Mosaic creator due to its faster conversion and better result with smaller number of thumbnails.

Download

Download the English version from the following link
http://www.photofiltre-studio.com/freeware/PhotoMosaique-en.zip