Microsoft AutoCollage 2008-Easiest way to create a collage out of your pictures

Posted by Vivek ||

September 4, 2008 ||

(2 votes, average: 3.00 out of 5)

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Microsoft today launched a software for photographers called as Microsoft AutoCollage 2008. AutoCollage 2008 is a new desktop software which seamlessly joins multiple individual photographs into one. The method it uses is object recognition and face detection. Following is the overview of the software in Microsoft’s words.

AutoCollage is an application for automatically creating collages from your images. Pick a folder, press a button, and in mere moments AutoCollage presents you with a unique memento to print or to e-mail to your family and friends.

The software is only available for Vista and Windows XP SP2. We downloaded and tried our hands on the software and it’s as easy as any software can get. Just select the folder of pictures and say create. Save the picture and you have your collage ready. Following is a collage we created using Microsoft AutoCollage 2008. What we however did not like is that even in the 30 Days Trial version your collage created with Microsoft AutoCollage 2008 will have a watermark as can be noticed in the picture below.

Following is a demonstration video of Microsoft AutoCollage 2008.

Is this an answer to Picasa’s Face Recognition? IMHO, both cater to a different type of needs and Microsoft has to integrate a lot of features to make it reach closer to Picasa.

We also pulled out for our readers the press release by Microsoft.

Microsoft Research Press Release

CAMBRIDGE, UK – 4 Sept 2008 – Microsoft Research today launched AutoCollage 2008, a desktop application that allows users to easily compile a set of individual photographs into one seamless collage.

In just a few clicks, people can transform an unwieldy group of photos, for example, of an event like a wedding or holiday, into a single collage image that can be printed, used in e-postcards, web pages, desktop backgrounds, or emailed to family and friends.

Available to trial from the Microsoft Research download site, AutoCollage is an advanced computer vision and image processing program that assembles pictures into a seamless collage using methods such as object recognition and face detection. Having automatically identified interesting parts of pictures, AutoCollage combines the separate pictures into a composite collage by deliberately following natural features as a boundary between images.

Tags: collage image, Collage maker, collages, face detection, microsoft AutoCollage 2008, Microsoft AutoCollage 2008 press release, object recognition, Photography