openSUSE users collage

Today I stumbled upon blogpost by Andreas Gohr called identi.ca Mosaic. He took 30.000 avatars of identi.ca users and created a mosaic from them using the metapixel software. What a great idea! How about doing something similar for openSUSE folks?

We hadn’t metapixel packaged in openSUSE, so I created the package in Contrib repository. Then I started collecting the avatars of openSUSE users. I searched both twitter and identi.ca for messages containing “opensuse” and added the authors’ avatars to the pool. Identi.ca also has groups, so all members of openSUSE group ended there as well. Facebook contains both openSUSE group and openSUSE page so I grabbed all avatars I found there too. At the end I was able to collect 3760 avatars of people using or interested in openSUSE!

I started experimenting with metapixel, but because I still had 10 times less images available than Andreas, I was not able to produce very good results. Fortunately, I discovered -c option, which tries to create a collage instead of a mosaic, which looks much better. (Mosaic has photos arranged in a rectangular grid, while collage does not.) After some fiddling I was able to create the following pictures. I hope you like them! :-) (use right click and “Save as” when downloading hi-res images)

hi-res: 6000x3754

hi-res: 6000x3750

If you’d like to play with the parameters I give you the tarballed avatars (6 MiB), original images (1 MiB) and the command lines I used to produce the image:

tar xfj opensuse-users.tar.bz2
tar xfj collage-sources.tar.bz2
mkdir ./opensuse-users-ready
metapixel-prepare --width=48 --height=48 ./opensuse-users ./opensuse-users-ready
metapixel -c -l ./opensuse-users-ready -w 48 -h 48 -m wavelet -d 500 -e global --metapixel opensuse-logo-6000.png opensuse-users-collage.png
metapixel -c -l ./opensuse-users-ready -w 48 -h 48 -m wavelet -d 300 -e global --metapixel chameleon.jpg opensuse-users-collage-2.png

Enjoy! (Don’t forget to install metapixel package from Contrib.)

Update: Lubomir Rintel tried to do a similar collage for Fedora users, check his version.