I haven't used this yet, but plan to for our trip to WDW in December. For curiosity's sake---how long does it take to make your mosaic using this program? Also---did you have to pick which pictures went in each color of the swirl "i.e. putting the purple in the purple part, the blue in the blue, etc." or is the program intelligent enough to see the background color and place it appropriately??
The program does the work for you and picks the pictures. There are several options available, if you want it to be able to flip pictures or use them side-ways to make a better product. I personally only wanted mine the "right" way. It also has an option to adjust the color to make a more fluent big picture, the default is 7%. I would have liked 0% but ended up using 5%, you just have to play with the program and see what works best for you.
Oh yea, one more thing, pick a base picture that has all of the colors of the rainbow in it or you will end up not being able to use all of your photos!
The program also has 3 different choices, portrait, landscape, or square. They are actually 3 different programs that are all loaded together.
I did take my original picture and saturated the colors using photoshop which seemed to help the program pick better fits.
Getting organized is probably the most time consuming. On my external hard drive I put all of our disney pix from 2008 into one file. I think there were 1500+. The program analyzed those pix and came up with around 800+ that it could use (probably because some where horizontal and some were vertical). The analyzing takes about 10 minutes.
Then it builds your mosaic, which probably takes about 5-10 minutes also depending on how many times you have chosen for it to make. You will want to play with it and try different things. It makes really big files so be prepared to dump them onto an external hard drive if you need to. (I have one of those cheap $259 Wal-Mart Acer laptops, so not much hard drive space).
When I was making the cruise ship poster, I had a heck of a time getting the back of the ship to not blend in with the water and the tailfin to really look good. I ended up actually hand picking a few pictures for the back end and photoshopping them onto the mosaic before sending it to shutterfly. I can't even tell which pix I changed now that its hanging on the wall.
Can't wait to see your projects!