PictureMedley

In musical terms, a medley combines a variety of melodies to form a new composition. When you listen to a musical medley, you hear and can recognize the individual melodies; and the overall composition has its own overall theme and presence.

In photographic terms, then, a medley combines a variety of photographs to form a new composite image. As with the musical medley, you can see and recognize the individual images within the Picture Medley, but the overall composite image captures a bigger concept than the individual images can capture on their own.

Medley images are also referred to as photographic mosaics, or photographic montages.

Overview

The software returns after a brief hiatus in which I've given it a facelift, a new name, fixed bugs, and added a couple of minor features. Here are a few highlights:

  • New name and updated styling for the UI. Brought the help file up to date.
  • Simplified including the Target image as a tile (new checkbox in step 2).
  • HTML output now uses ImageMap.
  • New option in the Customize menu to disable the "use tiles only once" feature.
  • New "Frost" visual effect: the overall medley is tinted slightly with the colors of the target image, which helps to make the target image more visible especially when you don't have enough of the right colors in the image tiles.
  • Fixed a few bugs, reduced memory footprint, improved performance.

Check out the Gallery!

I have been very fortunate in that a few people have kindly shared their creations with me, which is very rewarding. You can find the gallery section here. 

Frequently Asked Questions

I love hearing feedback from folks running the software, even when it's to report that the program isn't running correctly. Below are some of the more common questions I've seen. It's important to note that these do reflect areas in the program that I would like to improve; I have a few approaches in mind to address and resolve these issues. It's just a matter of time... Until then, if you run into one of these issues I hope the suggestions below are helpful.

Error when saving medley

It's funny, back when I wrote this program most digital photos were pretty low resolution and there weren't very many of them. Nowadays, high-resolution digital cameras are everywhere and people snap digital photos faster than ever before.

Several have written to report seeing an error attempting to save a medley image, after seeing the medley created successfully in the preview. Usually it's "Parameter Not Valid", but might also indicate a shortage of memory.

Usually this has one (or both) of two causes: a very large number of digital photos being used in the medley, and/or the digital photos are high resolution. Fortunately, you should be able to get good results with two workarounds:

  1. Try creating a medley using fewer images (use a smaller number for “tiles on longest side”).
  2. Use the “library” feature to make a smaller copy of each of the pictures you’re using as tiles. The smaller images are relatively low resolution compared to the original photos, but considering that they are 200 pixels across, that means at 200dpi (a typical printing resolution) each tile could be an inch across, and that is enough to print quite a large medley.

Error when creating the medley

Some have written to report that the program stops running before it has finished loading all of the images for the medley. Sometimes this is accompanied by an error indicating "path not of legal form."

A common cause for this is one or more "rogue" files in the folder tree being referenced for the tile images.

The workaround can unfortunately be somewhat tedious - you'll have to try generating a medley with different subsets of the tile images until you are able to create a medley successfully. Once you do, you'll know that the rogue image is in the set you didn't use for the successful medley.

The "library" feature might help here also - it scans the tile folder tree and loads each image in the process of creating a tile library. This process should halt on the same rogue file, and by looking at the tile library that it creates you can estimate the location of the rogue file based on how much (or little) of the original files made it into the tile library.