Topic: Image tiling/collage program?

[JonLeung]

What program would allow me to take a number of same-proportioned images and automatically tile them into a single image?  Like a picture index, but with no text, just a bunch of photos lined up nicely.  [EDIT: As in, a collage.]  And with the option to have zero space in between images.

This is super easy to do manually, after all, it's just pasting images next to each other, but takes too long with the number of images that I have on hand.

I'm trying Picasa 3, which for the most part, does what I want, but though I can set the aspect ratio of the output image, I can't seem to set the desired resolution.  So probably because it's scaling images unnecessarily, I'm finding that Picasa is creating a row of pixels between some rows of images but not others, even when I specify no borders.  I just want images nice and tight, with the resolution that I expect!

Any suggestions?

EDIT: I guess I could have simply referred to it as a collage, which is what Picasa itself calls it.  Silly me.  Still...any suggestions?

[vgmapsuser]

The one that immediately jumped to mind is ImageMagick.  I believe the mode you want is montage mode.  You can also write scripts around it.  You may need a Unix/Linux machine to take full advantage of it, but https://www.virtualbox.org/ or http://www.vmware.com/ can help you do that without dedicating a whole computer to it.  Also, it would also let you run other older programs with a proper box setup.  Finally, you can also share files between the boxes and your computer, if necessary, to minimize breaks in workflow.

[Revned]

ImageMagick can run on Windows either natively or via Cygwin. It's command line-only, though, which might be a dealbreaker for Jon

[JonLeung]

If I don't expect to use it outside of a few instances, I am sure I can handle a bit of command-line stuff.  I'm more lazy than stupid, you know. 

[Revned]

I wasn't trying to imply that you're stupid, apologies. It's just that ImageMagick is pretty difficult to work with. I spend most of my day in the command line, yet whenever I want to do something nontrivial with ImageMagick it takes me a long time to figure it out. It's basically a micro-programming language

[JonLeung]

Oh, okay, well in that case...  I thought maybe it was just like going into the DOS prompt and typing in the executable followed by a few parameters.  I used to like making batch file shortcuts back in the days.  But if it's any more than that, yeah, I wouldn't care for it, however you want to explain my disdain.

I just figure that for what I'm trying to do, I'm surprised it should have to require effort.  Picasa's size limitation and odd insertion of lines strikes me as bizarre.

There are a number of programs I see now that I Google "collage".  However at this cursory glance some of them seem to have "fancy" designs or layouts when all I want is something simple yet precise.  I don't need borders, I don't need a background image, I don't need watermarking, I don't need posting directly to Facebook, I just want images next to each other, as they were, with no distortion, sheesh.  If it takes very long to find something like that I could probably have accomplished the same task in the same amount of time just by copying and pasting manually.  Even if it is a few hundred images...

[vgmapsuser]

My thought was that he was making the images necessary to do CSS sprites.  If that is the case, Imagemagick is really good, especially if they are PNGs or GIFs.  Just an idea as you could automate it as most shells support using * for expansion and be assured all tiles are the same size.  It would take some fiddling to dial it in but I don't think it would be as bad as doing a ton of copy+pastes.  A starting point would probably be "montage * -geometry +0+0 -background transparent -gravity NorthWest montage.png"   Another thing it does is if you specify a new html page instead of an image, then it will also give you an html page with coordinates as well, if you need that information.

Regardless, I understand that Imagemagick, like any powerful too, can be quite daunting.  It can definitely be a hair-puller to figure out the proper incantation.  Also, I've had odd experiences with it on Windows and some examples have bashisms or POSIX syntax, however that was quite a few years ago since I last tried in on Windows.

Also, not every program is for everyone, so no worries on ignoring my idea.