Everyone has those mosaic pictures hanging on their walls and when you ask them, the usual answer you receive is that they paid hundreds of dollars to a professional photo designer to have that mosaic made and framed. While I agree that those professional photo mosaics are nothing like you can make at your home, you can still try your hand at the art of building photo mosaics using a free tool called PhotoMosaique.
PhotoMosaique comes with hundreds of tiny thumbnails of its own packed inside the folder named Thumbnails, but the program developer suggests that you can replace the pictures inside folder with your pictures (preferably of large resolution). The higher resolution of thumbnails makes creates the mosaic very slow, but the result is very good.
There are three different ways to select a thumbnails folder containing images of your own. First method is to launch the program itself and then select Options → Thumbnails folder from the menubar and then choose a folder containing your own images. Second method involves replacing the stock thumbnails – you can just rename the Thumbnails folder to Old-thumbs, create a new folder named Thumbnails and then copy your own images inside this folder. Third method is to edit the PhotoMosaique.ini configuration file and edit the Thumbnails setting. The first method is easiest of them all.
After launching the PhotoMosaique program, all you have to do is select an image that you want to use for creating the mosaic. Clicking on the Create the Mosaic button will then instantly turn the image into a mosaic using the pictures inside the Thumbnails folder. You can save the new image or print it on your printer. If you want to have it printed on a large poster size paper and have it framed, then you can take the final image to a nearby photo laboratory.
Conclusion: PhotoMosaique program is the easiest of all the photo mosaic creating apps that I have come across. You can customize the thumbnails that are used to create the thumbnails and print them on your home/office printer.
You can download PhotoMosaique program from http://www.photofiltre-studio.com/freeware/photomosaique-en.htm.