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.

Another trip to tilden

We headed up to Tilden park to try out the new jogging stroller today. We started the outing on the Nimitz trail, but it turned out to be way too smooth for our bump and offroad loving baby, so we headed for the Skyline trail instead: