What AutoCollage does, it does well. Unfortunately it's the omissions which sink it for me.
LIke many people these days, I've a lot of photos. They sit happily on a NAS, accessible by every other graphics software package I use. Even IrfanView, written by a lone student from the Balkans, can manage to access the NAS. But not AutoCollage.
Never mind, I thought. Just copy the pix I need across from the NAS to ...\My Documents\My Pictures\AutoCollage. It only takes time and we all have lots of that, don't we? Dreaming Spires, and so forth.
Now, a few pix lined up horizontally in AutoCollage, one deep, would make a nice web banner, wouldn't it? Or perhaps I could use it as a bit of visual punctuation at the top or bottom of an ephoto-album. No problem, AutoCollage can do clever stuff so it can easily cope with this. Wrong, there is a small problem; just 3 fixed sizes (in Imperial and no metric, though with landscape and portrait options) and one pixel size (full screen). None of these remotely correspond to a banner size. Next problem; AutoCollage can only blend 7 or more images - rather more than a banner would be comfortable with unless very closely packed. No truck with the 'small is beautiful' school here. Ah, well...
Never mind, it would be nice to give the kids a poster, say A3 size, for Christmas, wouldn't it? AutoCollage won't do small; surely it must do large? No it doesn't.
So, as an interesting research project demonstration, excellent.
As a useful tool, it won't do small, it won't do large, it won't do banners. It won't access my NAS, it won't do pixel sizes. I appreciate that there are tedious workarounds for all of these issues. But tedious workarounds don't add value. You're not planning to charge for this software, are you?
Thank you for trying AutoCollage, and taking the time to make these feature suggestions. We've taken note of them, and will consider them for any future AutoCollage releases.
In creating version 1.0 of AutoCollage, we strived to provide a core set of features enabling easy collage creation. These features are designed to be easily accessible to a broad variety of users.
Every feature takes time to implement and test. Making a feature that works in ideal circumstances - such as using files over the network from a NAS on your LAN - is relatively straightforward. Making those features work or at least fail gracefully under less perfect conditions - for example accessing network files over a low-speed, unreliable link from a server that reboots in the middle of AutoCollage reading the files - is much more difficult. Further, features must be exposed in a way that doesn't confuse or distract those who don't wish to use those features.
Thank you again for your feedback, and for your suggestions!