Picture Tile

Picture Tile

Back when I used a film camera, I used to cover one of my walls with snapshots, but now that I use a digital camera, I no longer have prints lying around. I wrote this program to make it easy to cover my wall with digital prints in the form of large posters.

The image to the right is an example of the kind of layout it can do: note that the source images are of a variety of sizes and shapes.

Download:

picturetile.pl

The Image::Magick Perl module is required.

Instructions:

See the comments at the top of the script for descriptions of the various command-line options. It's fairly straightforward, but some arithmetic is required.

Example:

To print out my posters, I first picked around 300 of my favorite photos from the last several years, and copied them into one place. Then, I did this:

The end result!

    picturetile.pl -v         \
       --size 12900x25200     \
       --directory my-photos  \
       --scale 0.4882         \
       --margin 37            \
       --border 75            \
       --pages 2              \
       out.tiff

That gave me two output files, out1.tiff and out2.tiff, each of which was 490 MB and measured 3½' × 7' at 300 DPI. These files were composed of roughly 5" photos, with a an overall ¼" border around the whole image. Each sheet ended up with roughly 150 pictures on it (that's why I started with 300 pictures.)

As it happens, I have a friend who has access to a printer that can print on paper that big! For those of you who don't have friends with access to such great toys at work, you'll have to take your files to Kinko's or similar to get them printed.

Mounting them to the wall was the next challenge, for two reasons: first, my walls are concrete; and second, it's a lot of paper: giant posters like this are pretty heavy! What I ended up doing was getting two huge sheets of foam-core at a local art-supply store, mounting those to the wall with double-sided sticky tape, and then mounting the prints to the foam-core. Initially I planned to use thumb tacks, but that didn't work out, so I ended up using the sticky tape to mount the prints to the foam-core. I could have mounted the prints directly to the wall, but this way it will be possible (but not easy!) to move them without destroying them.