Microsoft Research Community

I have in a folder 250 Fotos in the folder where i want to make my picturce

Is it possibkle to select some more fotos and deselt a foto which was used from thios folder

Hi Haj,

To make AutoCollage easy to use for everyone it will always use all the images from a single selected folder, and then select the images that it finds to be most representative and interesting from this set to create the collage.

If you want to use a specific set of images the best way to do this is to place the images you want in a new folder, and then to select this new folder using AutoCollage. This way you have complete control over the images that it will use in the collage.

This is also explained in the FAQ here: http://community.research.microsoft.com/forums/t/1463.aspx

Thanks,
Chris.

Hi,

I had the same issue. I selected around a 100 photos from a recent trip to Thailand, and I was hoping to run AutoCollage a few times and get a nice selection of collages from it, but I keep getting the same set of photos. short of diving my 100 photos into separate folders each with 15 or so photos in, is there any way of randomising the selection process

given what a great job it does showing all the photos you have, it seems a real shame it keeps picking the same photos

Cheers

David 

Hi David,

Thanks for trying Microsoft Research AutoCollage. Selecting the most interesting pictures of a certain set is a complex problem. At this time, the algorithm used by AutoCollage in this "ranking" stage will take into account the number of faces in images, their histogram and some other metrics, but it will produce the same set of "most interesting pictures" if given again the same input set.

We are considering the user feedback, and will take action for future feature packs and versions based on it.

Alisson.Sol 

Hi

Thanks for the explanation. Though I can’t claim to understand the specfic algorithms, I can appreciate that for a certain set of photos, it will be dterministic in what it picks to be the best collage. It would be good if some info along these lines were included with the product, so people can understand why it does what it does.

But from a usability viewpoint, now you are selling this as a commerical product, I think you need to address the fact that people will be digging out batches of photos and will expect to see a range of different collages, and not jus the same pictures. Perhaps some degree of randomness needs to be introduced around the selection, so if you re-run “Create” you get a slightly different slection, or elese people will be forced to start manipulating files in folders, whichis what I had to resort to

Cheer

David