In my travels around the web, I surfed onto the Mike Matas blog. As a tech aficionado, Mike has been in my periphery for some time. He's been designing user-interfaces that are awesome for some time now and he's exceptionally remarkable since he's so young … 18 now I believe. Anyhow, I ran into his blog and saw a tutorial he posted on making a life poster and it caught my eye. A very cool idea, especially for summing up a year. Not being a mac user, I set out on my PC quest to make a life poster. I decided the only reasonable medium was Picasa. Picasa is a very cool free photo cataloging system for the PC, from those geniuses over at Google. I started playing with the collaging features of Picasa. While it's an excellent program, they made it a little too user friendly (i.e. cut out a lot of options that would have been nice) so you have to sort of work within its confines. Here's how I did mine:
1. Start by gathering images that you like or that go together for some reason into a folder. You'll need 54 of these for the size I made. These should be pretty good quality images. 1000×1000 dimension minimum. Try to vary your images. You don't want all people or all landscapes. Choose your best images, most colorful, most special. Try to get some outdoors ones … these tend to not be so white/bright. 2. Fire up Picasa and find your folder. To make this the best, you should go thru and re-size all your images to be squares, making sure not to cut too much off as you need to print these!! To do that, open the picture and use the crop tool. There isn't a pre-specified ratio for square, but like most PC graphics software, holding down the shift key while dragging makes your selection tool square.
3. When you've cropped all your photos, rearrange them in a pleasing manner in the folder by dragging them about. You can let Picasa randomize them, but I didn't have very much luck with this.
4. Select the first 36 photos and hit collage. You need to tell Picasa to do the photo grid and where to put it. Perhaps the desktop? If you click the preview it brings up, it will randomize your images. Don't do this!!!
5. Highlight the last 36 pictures and make another collage. This is the step where it's REALLY important that you don't click the preview and randomize the positioning of the images.
6. Now you have two 6×6 collages. But since we're making a 20×30″ poster, what you really want is a 6×9 collage. To fix this problem, simply bring up the two collages in your graphics program (Gimp, Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, whatever) and cut and paste the collages together, overlapping the two images where they are the same (the middle 3 rows of photos). Upload it to your favorite print producer (KodakGallery, Snapfish, Shutterfly, whatever).
Note, this will work with many configurations other than 6 x 9 images. You just have to do a little math to figure out how many images you need and if it will work out.
— start math nonsense —
n = images wide, this should be any even number, though go for 6, minimum … you choose this one
m = images tall
m=n*1.5 (as the poster you'll be printing has a 2:3 ratio)
The number of images that you'll need will be m*n or n*n*1.5 … simple pimple, eh?
QED
— end math nonsense —