Knitting Bee in Collagr

I saw on Lifehacker mention of a web based application called Collagr which can be used to generate collages from your photostream on Flickr or Photobucket. Since I like to play with photographs and images, I thought I'd see what it could do. The results were not quite polished enough to be completely happy with them, but it was easy to do. I think that some experimentation and tinkering with the settings would allow you to make a pretty nice collage.

The image below was generated with the default settings using my Flickr photostream. You put in the URL for your photostream directory or you can search terms. You can tinker with the settings after the images have been grabbed. Things like background color, spacing between pictures, and filter colors. Once generated, Collagr hosts the image. You can download it, or embed the link generated in your page. I chose the thumbnail embed link just to see if it would work in Blogger and it seems to, at least in Preview mode.



The image above used Large for the size setting. The one below used Small.



And this last one used borders instead of stitched.

Photo Collages

I've always enjoyed making collages and remember making them for an art class. My grandmother had lots of pictures of family and places that collected in boxes and discovered the fun of making collages by cutting them up and putting them together for family members as gifts (much to the horror of my genealogy buff cousin Andy who viewed it as desecration of valuable historical evidence for family history).

There's a certain pleasure in taking the photos, sharing them, and keeping them around you. You're surrounded by pleasant memories in a more physical sense.

I've bumped into a free software download that uses your photos as collages on your desktop allowing you to select your choice of photos you want to include on your Windows desktop. It's called Photojoy, a very apt name for the application, because that's what you feel as your desktop loads and changes your selection of photographs. There are a variety of desktop styles to download and you can choose what folders you'd like Photojoy to look in with contents to include in your collage. You can also include photostreams from Flickr.

Photojoy advertises:

Wallpaper Collages – The perfect way to relive your favorite moments
3D Screensavers – Make your photos look spectacular
PhotoToy Widgets – Display your photos in fun ways
Professional photos – 1000’s of them
So much fun and so easy to use

And it really is fun and easy to use. I showed it to my assistant Pam who likes to have photos of her loved ones around her and she immediately was entranced by it. Visitors to our office have noticed it and its use seems to be spreading like a virus in the building. So it obviously hits upon something that is an attraction to many. Photojoy is a joy!

Here's a screenshot of my current desktop selection from Photojoy:



Enjoy those digital pictures you've taken by downloading Photojoy and adding them to your desktop environment where they'll give you pleasure each time the display changes.

Image Play - Embossing Revisited

I revisited the Sporkforge embossment generator after looking for a RGB values chart to get some color values I liked better than the brown toned parchment that was the default there. The results are above.

Image Play - Embossing

I took a poster made in Flickr Toys in Thing 8 and used another free application to create the image above. I want to go back and change the color, but that will wait for another day. The sun's out and it's time to get outside after a very long winter and cold spring. Today one might believe that summer will actually arrive and I intend to get out and enjoy the sun while it's still shining.

More Image Play With My Favorite Photograph

(Click on the picture for a better, bigger view of the textorize effect in the photo.)

I bumped into an application called Textorize while looking for more "things" for the more 23 things project being planned by the multitype directors. It looked intriguing (reminded me of a graphics project we had to do in a business class in high school that involved a lot of counting and typewriters) and I thought I wanted to try it out. Textorizer is a tool that transforms a picture into another picture made up of chosen words.

There are actually two versions of Textorize. I used the web version of Textorize II to create this effect of a favorite picture of my grandson reading. I got the image link (the second box with the url from Flickr when you look at the photo and select size) from my Flickr photostream. I pasted that url into the appropriate box in Textorize II, and added the text I wanted used: DJ reading picturebook fun Flotsam by David Wiesner. I adjusted one setting (how many lines of text to use) to increase it, and hit the button at the bottom of the page. Shortly afterwards the image you see, but larger and in a svg format appeared on my Firefox browser screen. The tricky part was trying to grab the image, save it in an image format usable for my blog, and sharable. I spent way too much time last night fiddling around with that, and not very successfully. However, I finally found that I could print the image in a large size and did so. Then I scanned it to a jpg file and saved it that way, then resized it. I know, cheating, but I just couldn't get the screen capture add on to Firefox to work for me, wasn't satisfied with printscreen in Windows. I'll go back to it later to resolve at another time when the frustration has faded. In the meantime I have yet another version of the photo that warms my heart every time that I see it, this time composed of letters and words, rather appropriate for a photograph of a child reading.

Image Generation Possibilities

The same photo as a sketch, charcoal sketch with slight color, and charcoal sketch with more color as generated by the Sporkforge.com image generation utilities.

Image Processing Software

I found some image processing software that allows you to generate an image from your photo to either look like a sketch, a charcoal sketch and several other possibilities, including embossing. This photo of my grandson DJ taken with his dad's cell phone to show me his missing teeth is one I tried with the Charcoal sketch software. It gives kind of cool results. You can add color to it if you like. There are several settings you can adjust to give different results. The company is Sporkforge.com, their image generating utilities.

Thing 6

Exploring all the graphic tools and image generators could be a real easy way to get sidetracked. One thing just leads to another. Big Huge Labs has so many really easy apps and is very intuitive to use. I did discover one quirk when creating a slide show with photos from the web. If I exported it to my blog with their tools, when the slideshow played there was one photo which I had not put into the show which came with it. So I finally decided to just put the link in a list as when I did that only the photos I had included played. Just a little digital quirk apparently. I made a license plate with Image Chef and put it in the sidebar of my blog. For those who don't know, Yoopers refer to those living "below the bridge" in the Lower Peninsula as trolls (yes, the reference is from the folk tale).

My trading card also got posted in the sidebar earlier. And I had to play with Spell with Flickr again to figure out how I got the image to show up so I could help out another blogger. I liked the way the word turned out, so I left it in my blog.

Another person wanted to manipulate her image so I looked for a way to do it and found a possibility that I have to try out myself later.

Just for fun, I went to Findr and searching on the tag snowman viewed a really neat collection of pictures of (mostly) snowmen which was fun...only one photo seemed out of place..but I think I figured out how it got there. (There's more than one kind of snowman, apparently.) I did the same thing with Splashr: My Presentation


These tools which are freely available online are a great resource that cash strapped libraries can tap to give promotional materials a professional look without spending a lot of time doing it. Spending time exploring them is well worth the time and their use is only limited by your imagination.