Microsoft AutoCollage

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I was searching on Google recently looking for some collage building software for my wife Wendy. She has previously attempted to prepare a collage for one of her work functions in Photoshop and whilst it can certainly be done it is very time consuming and laborious. Fiddling around with multiple layers and layer masks takes patience and the inclination to do so.

There are some good collage packages on the web and I came across the Microsoft Research AutoCollage program which I want to tell you about today. This has just recently been released and after giving it a whirl on a few collages I must say I'm suitably impressed at the speed and ease at which you can create collages. It's not perfect but it's versatile, fast and it certainly couldn't be easier to use?


Microsoft Auto Collage is not a free program but you can download a trial version and play around with it to see if it works for you. The trial version will work for 30 days and will watermark the collage. If you wish to purchase the software it retails for USD19.95 on the Windows Marketplace website.

Start your collage building by opening the application and clicking the Image Browser ellipse '...' to browse to a folder that has your collage pictures. At the moment the software is restricted to a maximum of 25 photo's in a collage and there is no way to specify which of the 25 you wish to use from a particular folder. My suggestion is that you create a seperate folder in which you place your selected photographs.


Before creating your collage it's worth spending a little time setting up the environment. Do so by clicking on the Options button and selecting the size of your collage output. There are currently some limiations in terms of output size and you are restricted to imperial measurements or your desktop size. Click on the Advanced button and adjust the relative sizes of the image that you have ranked higher than the others. AutoCollage reads the EXIF data and determines the star ranking that you have assigned to your image using the Microsoft photo tools or some other image editing application such as Adobe Lightroom. You can also adjust the collage image overlap to taste. No doubt you will come back to this screen and adjust these settings once you get a feel for how the application operates.

Click the Input tab at the top and be sure to turn on Face Detection. Although not fool-proof this does stop the AutoCollage rendering process from obscuring faces during image overlap. When you have face dection on Auto Collage will draw yellow-boxes around the faces it can recognise during the import process.

Once you have the preferences setup be sure that the slider reflects the correct number of images otherwise you will get a warning message and an option to create a collage of the correct number of images. This slider seems totally redundant to me but nevertheless there it is. I guess it remains to be seen how Microsoft utilise this slider in a later version? When you're ready to generate your collage press the Create button and your collage rendering will begin by showing a revolving carousel of images as well as a progress bar on the top right. This process is incredibly quick for the work (blending and compositing) that AutoCollage is doing but then again with a maximum of only 25 images the process shouldn't take that long at all.


If you don't like the Collage result you could possibly adjust the star-rating of your images or simply press the Create button again and a new rendering will take place. The final collage can then be exported as a JPG, sent to friends via email or saved to your desktop as your wallpaper.

As a first release AutoCollage has some misgivings and these include:
· Maximum of 25 images in a collage
· No mechanism for specifying an image that you want dead-centered
· Small paper sizes up to a maximum of 8"x10" and would also be ideal if it supported metric paper sizes (A4 and A3 for instance)
· It would be nice to see the star-rating of images in AutoCollage so you know their relative rankings beforehand


However not withstanding these problem areas; for an incredibly simple 'quick-and-dirty' collage, it's hard to beat. Other applications have more features and slicker output perhaps but cannot match the ease of use at this stage. From an application point of view the Microsoft Research engineers have done some great stuff with face-recognition, automatic alpha blending and image segmentation. It's great to see it in action. Have fun.
P.S. Thanks to Stacey and Clive for letting me use photographs of their children that I just happened to have on my PC at the time I was creating screen-shots.

Addendum (2008-09-28): It turns out that I am completely wrong about how image ranking occurs for Auto Collage. Simply put it's a WHOLE lot more complicated than using star-rating of images. For a more 'scientific' explanation review this AutoCollage paper or visit the Microsoft Research website.

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