Life Posters / iPhoto Mosaics

A while ago I saw a cool link on Lifehacker about putting together a collection of images from your iPhoto library into a large format mosaic ( for printing through the built in Kodak printing service). The crux of the method is the fact that you can print a contact sheet at up to 8 columns wide into a PDF in iPhoto, which can then be converted to a jpg (or whatever), re-imported into iPhoto and then sent off for printing. This is fine, but the contact sheet ends up looking pretty bad if you have portrait *and* landscape shots, which I would assume most people do (also, 8 columns is the max width). Also, the Lifehacker protocol called for constraining the proportions of all the photos, which kind of sucks. Anyway, I figured there was a probably a better way using Imagemagick and with a little fiddling, I got more or less what I was looking for.

I should also mention that I found a piece of software called Posterino which looks nice, but also doesnt seem to do well with combining landscape+portrait (And charges $25 for a single user license! This isn't frickin rocket science here!).

The biggest problem was just installing Imagemagick on my Mac. As far as that goes, here is what worked:

1)Install MacPorts
2)sudo install ImageMagick
3)sudo install GhostScript
4)add /opt/local/bin to the PATH
5)grab type-ghostscript.xml type.xml
and install into /opt/local/share/ImageMagick-6.3.7/config/
6)edit the paths in type-ghostscript.xml to point to /opt/local/share/ghostscript/fonts/

e.g.
metrics="/opt/local/share/ghostscript/fonts/a010013l.afm"
glyphs="/opt/local/share/ghostscript/fonts/a010013l.pfb

and voila: ImageMagick installed. If you can install it in a more starightforward way, more power to you and you can skip all that.


Now the easy and fun part.

1)Export 96 of your images from iPhoto in File->Export, File Export tab into a folder.
2)Open a Terminal window and go to the directory where you exported
3)montage image_names -background black -geometry 650x650 -tile 12x8 ../poster.jpg

and you whould get an image called poster.jpg one level up.

now import into iphoto and order your prints.