nice work, buddy. are you going to to add transparency like webcollage?

Hmm. Interesting idea. I didn't think CSS had transparency controls. Looks like it does, but it browser support is pretty limited.

I'd much prefer to use my original idea of using ImageMagick to resize and composite the images, but it took 20-30 seconds to put together 10 pictures.

So I guess no transparency until everyone handles CSS3 or okcomputer gets a faster CPU.

you could use your original imagemagick plan, but construct the collage with a cronjob rather than per page request.

another interesting story - i was in new orleans a year ago, and he came out in a welding suit wielding a rod with lightning bolts flying out of it. he promptly burst into flames and they had to have backstage hands rush out and put him out.

incidently, the 30 foot tesla coil they had in the background fried all the PCs they were going to use for demos. ha!

For historical significance, I should note that I changed the collage a while ago to use ImageMagick as I originally intended. I changed things around to use the scaled or thumbnailed images for everything but the background and that cut down the processing time quite a bit. Saves a lot on bandwidth and doesn't bog down the browser's machine with useless calculations.

I'd really like to know how you did that. Is it scripted? Can you share your code?

It's a pretty messy combination of perl, PHP, and shell scripting right now. I'll post it on my site once I get a chance to clean it up properly.

I was really just curious about the imagemagick portion of it. Are you calculating the sizes and positions of the images in the perl scripting? I'd be interested even if it wasn't clean but I'd be glad to see it after it's cleaned up too! Thanks.