Microsoft Autocollage? What? How? Why?

Hey guys,

There is a great tool which is developed by our friends from MSR (Microsoft Research) to compile a set of pictures and mix them to get a really nice result

It is not just a tool which takes pictures one by one, it takes in account a big number of factors such as face recognition, colors, forms….

Personally, I love to use this tool to compile my best shots to show such previews or best of!  

Here some collages I ve done with my personal pictures taken in New-York and Canada recently:

Start Autocollage

When you start the application, the image browser will display pictures from the last open folder or from your personal image folder.

On the right panel, you have 2 different subpanels:

• Action
  • You can create your collage and save it one done
  • You can email it or define your background picture with it directly
  • Choose the number of picture which will compose your collage
  • Define collage and application settings via the options button
• Image Browser
  • Define the file location of your pictures

Autocollage options – 3 tabs

Output This tab enables to define the size and the orientation of the collage. You have some predefined formats but you can also define yours.	Input This tab is very interesting. You can “force” the autocollage process to give priority to some given pictures in the collage (ranking) You can also choose to see or not when autocollage detects faces during picture loading.	Registration Some common information about application version, your registration number…

Autocollage – How to proceed?

Ok we are set and ready to go!

Start defining your picture location with the image browser. You should see your pictures loaded:

The next step is to define the number of pictures you want for your collage. In the version 1.1 of the application, minimum is 7 and maximum is 50. Note that obviously more the number of pictures is more time it will take to proceed.

Define ranking

If you choose in the options to define ranking with your pictures. If you click on a picture, it will be resized and you will see the autocollage symbol Clicking on this symbol you will see the different ranking symbols:

Click on the desired picture. You see the autocollage symbol on the top left. This symbol represents an “automatic ranking”
Click once and you will get another symbol. This “1” represents the notion of “top ranked” picture.
Click once again. This “2” represents the notion of “second ranked” picture
Click once again The up arrow means “prefer this image”
Click once again The down arrow means “avoid this picture”

Collage creation

Once your customizations are ok, click on the Create button from the action panel on the right.

After few seconds, you will see the result!

Once done, you have all options to save, send, share it

You can get more information from the official website and also get it from: https://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/cambridge/projects/autocollage/

Vincent