Python package and CLI utility to create photo mosaics.

phomo lets you create photographic mosaics. It arranges the tile images to best recreate a master image. To achieve this, phomo computes a distance matrix between all the tiles and the master image regions, looking not just at the average colour but the norm of the colour distributions differences. Once this distance matrix is computed, each tile is assigned to the region of the master with the smallest distance between the colour distributions.

Installation

Requires python 3

In a terminal:

$ pip install phomo

As always, it is usually a good idea to use a virtual environment.

If you're just interested in command line usage, consider using pipx.

Usage

Python package

See the examples folder for usage as a python package.

CLI

Once it is installed, you can use the phomo command.

It would go something like:

$ phomo master.png tile_directory -S 20 20 -o mosaic.png

If in doubt see the help:

usage: phomo [-h] [-o OUTPUT] [-c MASTER_CROP_RATIO] [-s MASTER_SIZE [MASTER_SIZE ...]] [-C TILE_CROP_RATIO]
             [-S TILE_SIZE [TILE_SIZE ...]] [-n N_APPEARANCES] [-v] [-b] [-g] [-d SUBDIVISIONS [SUBDIVISIONS ...]]
             [-m {greyscale,norm,luv_approx}] [-j WORKERS]
             master tile_dir

positional arguments:
  master                Master image path.
  tile_dir              Directory containing the tile images.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -o OUTPUT, --output OUTPUT
                        Mosiac output path.
  -c MASTER_CROP_RATIO, --master-crop-ratio MASTER_CROP_RATIO
                        Crop the master image to width/height ratio.
  -s MASTER_SIZE [MASTER_SIZE ...], --master-size MASTER_SIZE [MASTER_SIZE ...]
                        Resize master image to width, height.
  -C TILE_CROP_RATIO, --tile-crop-ratio TILE_CROP_RATIO
                        Crop the tile images to width/height ratio.
  -S TILE_SIZE [TILE_SIZE ...], --tile-size TILE_SIZE [TILE_SIZE ...]
                        Resize tile images to width, height.
  -n N_APPEARANCES, --n-appearances N_APPEARANCES
                        The number of times a tile can appear in the mosaic.
  -v, --verbose         Verbosity.
  -b, --black-and-white
                        Convert master and tile images to black and white.
  -g, --show-grid       Show the tile grid, don't build the mosiac.
  -d SUBDIVISIONS [SUBDIVISIONS ...], --subdivisions SUBDIVISIONS [SUBDIVISIONS ...]
                        Grid subdivision thresholds.
  -m {greyscale,norm,luv_approx}, --metric {greyscale,norm,luv_approx}
                        Distance metric.
  -j WORKERS, --workers WORKERS
                        Number of workers use to run when computing the distance matrix.

Note

The grid subdivision feature was inspired by photomosaic.

TODO

• look into parallelizing/multithreading
• look into non greedy tile assignments
• palette matching
• documentation
• shell completion
• hex grid