What’s the best way to build a very large collage or mosaic from 2,300 photos?

Question

I need to combine about 2,300 photos into one very large image to use as a background. The photos should all remain the same size in the final layout. I’ve only found simple online collage tools, and Picasa doesn’t seem flexible enough for something this large.

What software or workflow works best for creating a collage or photo mosaic at this scale?

user9282 · Answer

You can use ImageMagick (open source and cross-platform) and use the command (assuming that your photos are PNGs):

montage *.png -tile 1x -mode Concatenate out.jpg

-tile 1x: concatenate vertically (use -tile x1 for horizontal)
-mode Concatenate: concatenate without any white space between the images

More details on the montage program (part of ImageMagick) if interested.

Some ImageMagick useful commands for pre-processing your photos before the collage:

you can resize the image (to approximately 2MB in this example) using:

mogrify -define jpeg:extent=2048KB out.jpg
you can modify the dimension of a bunch of images using (to 30% in this example):

mogrify -resize 30x30% *.png

Also note that JPEG/JFIF supports a maximum image size of 65535×65535 pixels, while the PNG specification doesn't appear to place any limits on the width and height of an image; these are 4 byte unsigned integers, which could be up to 4294967295 .

enter image description here

and if you are curious: Why does ImageMagick's montage limit the JPG output to 65500 instead of 65535?

What’s the best way to build a very large collage or mosaic from 2,300 photos?

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