Lily in Boxes – How to make a seamless mosaic

Most people that know me understand I have a huge crush on Lily Allen, probably only trumped by my other huge crush, Zooey Deschanel. Not only does she have a fantastic voice, but she’s also got a great personality and is very responsive to her fans (via Twitter and MySpace.)

I saw a little photo experiment on FriendFeed the other day from Simon Wicks in which he used the thumbnail size restriction on FF to create a photo mosaic of him standing in front of the Statue of Liberty.

I just posted a similar post using Zooey directly on FriendFeed, but I wanted to see if it would work using my RSS feed from my blog and MediaRSS. Here goes…

UPDATE: Didn’t work, so I’m going to use this as a tutorial on how to do this in Photoshop.

Instructions for a seamless 3 column, 4 row mosaic:

1. Find an image you want to “mosaic”. Open in Photoshop, and crop/resize the picture until it has a width of 474px and a height of 434px. Why 474×434? – Because Friendfeed puts a 8px right margin and 6px bottom margin on all thumbnail images as well as a 1px border and a 1px padding around all images. Adding the extra width into the cropping accounts for the “seams”
2. Using the marquee selection tool, change the “Style” to Fixed Size with a width of 150px by 100px.
3. Click once on the image, your pre-sized 150×100 selection box should appear. Drag the selection box to the upper left of the image, the first square.
4. Show your rulers, and drag a guide from the top ruler to the bottom of the selection box, and another to the right of your selection. You now have your first “box” outlined.
5. Zoom into your guides and drag another guide exactly 12px to the right, and another exactly 10px below.
6. Move your selection box to the next row down, underneath the second guide. Repeat Step 4 until you have four rows of boxes, each with a 10px space in between (except the last row, which should be flush at the bottom of the image.)
7. Move your selection box back up to the top row, second column after your second vertical guide. Drag another guide to the right of the selection box. Finally, drag your selection box to the last column, first row, and drag another guide to the LEFT of your image this time. You should have 12 guide boxes drawn on your image.
8. Choose the Slice tool, and click the “Slices from Guides” button. Then choose View-Clear Guides to remove the hand-drawn guides. We’ll be adjusting manually from here.
9. Double click on each of the “margin” boxes and make sure they have similar width’s/heights. Each “row” margin should be 150×10, each “column” margin should be 12×100.
10. 10. Delete the margin slices. Click on each slice and just hit your delete key, including the small boxes in between the margins. When finished, you should only have blue outlined numbered boxes around the “selections” and margin boxes should be greyed out. (See image to the right)
11. Double click each image “slice” and name them sequentially. Row 1, column 1 should be “01″, row 1 column 2 should be “02″ etc.
12. Choose File-Save For Web and hit ctrl-a to select all and choose “JPEG High” from the drop down. Find a directory to save, and save “All User Slices”. If you did it right, you should have a folder full of images numbered 01.jpg – 12.jpg.
13. Go to Friendfeed, title your post, and start uploading images sequentially. It’ll initially display 4 rows, but just ignore and keep uploading in order.
14. Sit back and enjoy the comments!

For The Daily Haggis readers, here’s a Photoshop PSD with the slices already laid out, just drag your image in and choose “Save For Web”!

Zooey in Boxes