I rarely post anything anywhere bc I hate creating accounts, but I feel so passionately about this that I had to respond.
First, This is a TOTALLY AWESOME tool. Thanks so much for writing it!!!
That said, E11 is totally right. We really badly need the ability to give it the approximate dimensions of the output. I’m sure 90+% of users are trying to fill a very specific space, just like E11 and I. (I’m writing to fill the space for a 16x9 video.) I’m sure there are a few uses for web sites and the like where people can scroll to wherever they need to scroll based on your returns, but for everyone who is trying to use this to fill a specific space, it becomes really difficult.
The problem is exacerbated by the fact the GMIC doesn’t produce accurate previews. Otherwise, it would be fine if I kept “cycling” till I got the rough dimensions I want. But instead, I basically have to keep saving at random, regardless of previews, and hoping for the right dimensions. For higher numbers of photos, this becomes time consuming. (BTW, I recently tried on around 50 photos, and the app crashed… The best I’ve done successfully so far is about 36. I know there must be limitations but I was hoping to get to 100 or so…)
Last but not least, yes I did read Pat’s post before I read this one, indeed before I ran into this difficulty much. The problem with custom, of course, is that the whole reason we are using this app is so we don’t have to layout every single photo. We are trying to find an automatic way of building these montages with minimal effort. Trying to create a custom layout for 50 photographs in a “random way” is exactly what we hope to avoid.
Just to give you a usage case, here’s a little more detail on mine: I’m trying to combine almost 600 photos into as few “slides” as possible. The intent is not to show fine details for most of them, but rather the variety amongst them. I was zooming from 1 to 4 to 9 to 16 and so on, to show how the complexity multiplied. By the time I got to 36 and 49, my intent was not to show things very clearly, as long as people could see that, look, there are 50ish different photos here that you can just kind of see. I was hoping a nice recursive algorithm could handle that for me, but I guess the memory usage is just too high at the numbers I want to get to. I’m, going to start having to divide and conquer manually, doing 24+25 and then putting them side by side to get my 49, etc. Still, it would be nice to be able to control the dimensions of the outputs. If I could just specify 2 8x9’s, I could more easily put them together for my 16x9.
Anyway, still great software, but I just feel like you’ve done 99% of the work to making this thing perfect and usable for all use cases, so I wish you could just give us the last piece of the pie.
Best
PJ
and feel that your account creation was worth it.