Lockdown Project: Creating an Album Cover Mosaic

Tinkering
1

In this time of social distancing and lockdowns we have to spend more time at home. I want to share one of my recent activities, as a suggestion on what to do.

When reading through this forum I stumbled upon this post from @Mikael_Ollars

Really liking the mosaic, I started to search for some software that can create something like this.

Let me start off with what I was alble to create:

albummosaic-1240x1240
albummosaic-1240x12401240Ă—1240 1.56 MB
albummosaic-1240x1240-zoom1
albummosaic-1240x1240-zoom11240Ă—1240 1.49 MB

albummosaic-1240x1240-zoom2
albummosaic-1240x1240-zoom21240Ă—1240 1.34 MB
albummosaic-1240x1240-zoom3
albummosaic-1240x1240-zoom31240Ă—1240 1.08 MB

In this Album Cover Mosaic the input image is divided into tiles and each tile is replaced by an album cover that best matches the color pattern of the input image.

Some Stats
185 megapixels
13600 x 13600 pixels
200 x 200 album cover thumbnails
1.15 x 1.15 meters when printed at 300 dpi
802 album covers in pool

I’m not sure yet what to do with it. For printing the individual album covers might be too small, I have to experiment with the numbers.

The Process

All albums in the mosaic are from my local library. For this I created an extension that uses the Roon API to generate a thumbnail of each album. This pool of thumbnails is then used by a Python library that creates the mosaic, this library is called photomosaic.

A small warning; creating a mosaic of this size is memory hungry. On my Windows 10 PC with 16 GB of RAM I can go up to 200 megapixels before it runs out of memory.

If there is an interest I can share more details in follow-up posts and provide some software.

More Mosaic Tools

  • AndreaMosaic - Used by Mikael in the above linked post, see also post 4 of this thread
7 Likes
2

Lovely, and also quite dissimilar to the one i did! I searched but couldn’t find any documentation or software related to my poster unfortunately.

All i have left is the big poster and an A3 sized overview.

3

Would be really great to have such an extension!

4

I just took a look in my “archives”. I Think i used a program called AndreaMosaic, but i cannot remember how i wasable to create Square tiles though. Otherwise it works just fine and i did one based on Beastie Boys - Licensed to Ill.
(Download by link above)

Overview looks like this:

BB
BB615Ă—615 764 KB

And when zoomed in a bit:

BB2
BB2817Ă—615 867 KB

1 Like
5

Ahem… Nevermind… When you download the Andrea Mosaic app, theres an executable called AndreaSquare.exe that should be used for square tiles… :blush:

I did one from Gary ClarkJr - Blak and Blue (126Mb jpeg).

GCJr_A
GCJr_A615Ă—613 957 KB

Detail:

GCJr_B
GCJr_B1077Ă—617 1.23 MB

Settings:

image
image837Ă—554 251 KB

6

Or, why not a classic like “Guns 'n Roses - Appetite for Destruction”:

GNRA
GNRA615Ă—617 926 KB

Detail:

GNRB
GNRB1041Ă—615 1.24 MB

Settings are the same as above, only a different base image.

7

Thanks for diving into your archives, I really like the AndreaMosaic tool! The option to adapt the colors to some extent allows for better results.

I installed version 3.39.0 (Windows 10) and the executable that is linked to from the start menu is AndreaMosaicMenu. This provides a Tile Type selection:

image

1 Like
8

Down-scaled images of the Tom Petty album by AndreaMosaic:

image
image1240Ă—1231 1.81 MB

image
image1240Ă—1240 1.24 MB

9

Lovely! Lots of albums i recognize! :slight_smile:
I printed 9 parts of the big image, each in A3 format, then cut and taped together the “poster”. I feel like trying another picture for the office now!

10

By using only album covers from my Roon library it becomes a sort of musical footprint that can be shared :slight_smile:

I don’t have a printer but maybe I will use a photo poster service to get a favorite album on the wall.

11

The extension that I used for thumbnail creation (called Art Scraper) is available now:

1 Like