BaroqueW

Here is a brief review of a few MacOSX picture apps I have had in the pipeline for a while.

• MacOSaiX: MacOSaiX’s objective is to create mosaics as you often see on commercials: multiple smaller images are used to recreate a bigger one. You can set up this freeware to change the final “resolution” of the mosaic, 30×30 is a minimum for a pic you took with your digital camera but don’t hesitate to go up to 50×50 if you are converting a picture rich in detail. You can use any images you have on your hard drive or even fetch images from Google Images by inputing a few keywords. To use your iPhoto library, use that path: /Users/YourName/Pictures/iPhoto Library/Originals/ or just /Users/YourName/Pictures/. For those out there who care about details, you can even choose each tile (the smaller images) one by one. And remember, it is free! Here is [an example. The garden pic is made up of 45×45 tiles, starting from a 600×449 picture; my PowerBook computed around one hour to achieve that result. A service of mosaic generation similar to this one and using pictures from Flickr is available online at Image Mosaic Generator.
• DoubleTake: this shareware ($16.95) generates panoramas from sets of pictures taken from a digital camera, in the case your camera does not have that functionality. This software decides itself what pics to use, where they join, how to adapt brightness and contrast. It can also apply the right anti-distorsion scheme to your pictures. Once again, you can take everything under control yourself: the position of the pictures, their contrast, the overall deformation and so on. Here is an example, with a panoramic view of the Bratislava Castle in Slovakia.
• iPhoto: it is the official Apple picture tool à la Picasa. iPhoto is part of the iLife suite so I guess there is no need to present it, you will probably prefer to have a look at some of its plugins:
• Plugins for iPhoto: iPhotoToGallery et Picasa Web Tools :
  • The first one enables you to link iPhoto to one or more galleries like this one. It also eases the exportation of your pics to your online gallery. From the local interface, you can create new folders, resize your pics before uploading, choose the informations to export etc.
  • The second one allows you to procede to the same kind of operations for the Picasa suite, the Google solution for pictures management and hosting.

• Finally, Image Schakle is the tiny but efficient widget I shrinked all the images of that post with. Just drag and drop a picture on this free widget, select the output size and you’re done!