Yup, this was made by a free program called GIMP. You can download it here.
Then you need to go here and download the image mosaic plugin.
Gimp is a big photo editing software package that was ported from Unix, so it's not terribly user friendly.
When you make your mosaics, it helps to have a HUGE library of pics (I have a mosaic tile library of 5500 porno pics). The pic I linked to is a 160 hex 1200 resolution pic, with 1000 tiles. As you can see, it is still really blocky. The problem is to make a picture that isn't blocky, but that you are still able to zoom into and clearly see the individual pictures. So basically, you need to create a HUGE resolution picture using tons and tons of tiles. That's why the good version of this is over 5 megs!
Anyway, I just printed this pic out on photo paper at 8x10 inches, and it looks pretty darn good! I think I'm going to frame it and hang it on my wall.
Joe, that is really, really cool!! That's for linking the site to the software.
Unfortunately, I have a very modest collection of only 250 Megs. So, I'm gonna try searching for more pics tonite so that I can create a better effect.
As a matter of fact, I don't have that dll. that's kinda weird.
There was a fix to the windows version of Gimp on that website... did you get that? Also, there was a readme that came with the mosaic plug in. Did you follow the instructions and copy the 2 files to the correct directories?
**UPDATE** Oops... I guess it would help if I looked on the right computer! I have a gimp-1.2.dll, but no gimp-1.1.dll. I can send you that if you want.
Did you try rebooting after you installed it? Maybe that is necessary.
You can create any picture you want. You just open the source picture in Gimp, then right click on it and apply the filter. It's really easy once you figure it out.
Did you try out macgimp yet? I'm not sure if they have the mosaic plug in, but it is worth a shot.