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Hey Flickr! Montage this!

Jennifer Guevin Former Managing Editor / Reviews
Jennifer Guevin was a managing editor at CNET, overseeing the ever-helpful How To section, special packages and front-page programming. As a writer, she gravitated toward science, quirky geek culture stories, robots and food. In real life, she mostly just gravitates toward food.
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Jennifer Guevin
2 min read
I remember when photo montages became all the rage at the Rogue Valley Mall where I grew up in Southern Oregon. You know the ones; the poster shops had just gotten over the Magic Eye fad and welcomed in a new era of novelty art, those pictures made up of thousands of tiny pictures.

I always thought I'd like to try my hand at creating one myself. But as any good procrastinator in the digital age knows, wait long enough before starting any project and some highly motivated developer will do the dirty work for you. Enter Billy Fowks.

Fowks is a Web developer who lives and works in Brooklyn, N.Y. A photographer, Fowks found a gold mine in Flickr's enormous database of photos. After seeing a Web app built using Flickr photos, Fowks was inspired to make one of his own.

The result is a neat little tool called the Flickr Montager that lets users create those photos-made-of-photos without all the messy glue and paper scraps. After a search term is input into the tool, it searches Flickr's database for a photo with that tag. That photo is displayed, then is recreated using about 1,000 tiny tiles, all of which show other Flickr photos with the same tag. Each of the tiles is clickable and can become the subject of its own montage. Users can also click through to the Flickr page where the photo resides.

Some photos are too complicated to be effectively rendered in this way though. Do a search for "sunflower," for example, and the tool tries to render "Georgia woman with flowers," a photo of a woman standing in front of a brick wall with arms loaded with flowers. The original picture is so complex that the montage that was made just looked like a jumbly mess.

So while it's not flawless, the Flickr Montager is a great little tool and is a fun introduction to the massive Flickr database for any photography lover. The Montager comes with a warning that it is "CPU intensive" and may crash your browser. I didn't have any problems with it, but those on tired old machines should be forewarned.