Rarely has it taken us this long to write an review on an app – not so much because we could not figure out how Mosaica works, but while struggling with the current limiations, we see so much potential in this app.
Creating mosaics
Creating a mosaic is pretty straight-forward. Launch the app, tap New Mosaic, then start shooting overlapping photos. You can keep snapping pictures while the app aligns the shots in the background. Once done and the photos are aligned, deal with the pictures that Mosaica could not align (it takes a bit of practice to take the shots in a way that Mosaica can deal with them – for beginners it is best if you wait after taking a shot until it is aligned to see what sticks and what not, so you can retake images if they got rejected). As soon as all images are aligned, you can check out your Mosaic and if you like it, name it and then upload it to Mosaica’s servers. If you like your mosaic, you can let you friends and followers know by twittering about it.
San Francisco downtown mosaic on my iPhone
Viewing a mosaic on the server
As soon as the individual images are uploaded, Mosaica does the rendering on the server and within minutes, your mosaic can be viewed online. The nice thing about its online viewer is the ability to zoom in using its Flash viewer, thus being able to see all the details that you cannot really see on your iPhone due to its limited screen real estate.
San Francisco downtown mosaic zoomed in on M.osaic.com
Mosaica is not a panorama stitcher
As you can see from the sample image, Mosaica does not stitch a panorama. Instead, it aligns the images and offers a mosaic rather than a stitched panorama. If you’d rather prefer a panorama than a mosaic, we recommend AutoStitch, our Editor’s Pick for panorama stitching.
What we like
- Interesting take on panoramas by using mosaics rather than panos. If you like the look, go for it. Also avoids the blending issue which is a big issue for panoramas taken with a camera that does have no manual settings
- Works well if your shots are properly aligned
- You can include horizontal and vertical images in a mosaic
- Online Viewer is great and could be the corner stone for future expansion of Mosaica’s services
- Fast when connected via Wi-Fi.
What we do not like
- When you take images with Zipix, our Editor’s Pick, or any other iPhone camera app and then import them into Mosaica, you cannot rotate the mosaic. Check out some of my San Francisco mosaics on M.osaica.com and you will have to manually rotate them every time
- There is no post-processing of the images as you could do with a stitched panorama. Sharpening? Color Adjustments? Blending? Relighting? Zero, none, nada. This was the main reason why I took the images outside of Mosaica (in Zipix)
- Even although Mosaica processes a full resolution mosaic on the iPhone, it only lets you view a lower res version
- Moving around a mosaic on the iPhone’s screen works only intermittently. Often, images are bunched up in a corner of the screen and it’s hard to center them on the screen so you can see the mosaic in all its glory.
- Ever so often, Mosaica misses on properly aligning an image. In that case you cannot manually align it – you have to discard it and retake it. If you took the images outside of Mosaica and cannot use them, you have to go back to where you took them in order to retake them. This is probably the biggest frustration I had with the program.
- Taking images within the app is mainly depending on the speed of the iPhone camera and thus slow
- Once you start an upload, you cannot interrupt. I made the mistake to start an upload over 3G in San Francisco multiple times. Each took between 10 and 15 minutes. Not Mosaica’s fault, but it is very limiting nevertheless. It’s best to not upload until you found a coffee shop with good WiFi.
Mosaica told us that some of these issues will be fixed in their upcoming release. We will certainly test it once it’s available. Until then, we will continue to use it and try to work around its current limitations.
So what’s the potential? Stay tuned for a separate post.
Verdict: Recommended, but only if you like mosaics.
Price: free from iTunes>
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