How to Make a Facebook Mosaic Album

With a bit of time and some imagination, it is possible to do cool things with the photo album view in Facebook. For example, the photo mosaic of the flower on the left is an album view of 24 separate images that together constitute the sum of the whole. It took me about 30 minutes to create this mosaic, and it’s relatively simple to do with the right tools on hand.

To replicate this effect, you would need the following: a screenshot of your Facebook photo album page, an image that you would like to turn into a mosaic and an graphic editing program like Photoshop that would allow you to make image slices.

Step 1. Take a screenshot of an existing photo album page in Facebook – on Macs, cmd+shift+4; on PCs, shift+print screen. For this example, I chose a photo album that had 24 images in it. You can also opt for just 20 images or less, provided the total is divisible by four to maintain a quadratic image.

Step 2. Open the screenshot image in Photoshop, then crop it to include only the parts that contain the photo thumbnails. This layer is the Background layer by default, so you will need to turn this into Layer 0 by simply double clicking on the layer’s name.

Step 3. With the rectangular marquee tool in Photoshop, draw a selection around the photo thumbnail and delete the selection. Do this for each of the thumbnails.

You can also do multiple selections by holding down the shift key while highlighting the boxes with the marque tool.

When you’re done your image should look like this image.

Step 4. Open your target image – the one you would like to turn into a mosaic in Photoshop. Select the entire image (cmd+a, Mac; Ctrl+a, PC) and copy and paste it as a new layer in your first image. Just make sure that this layer is underneath the Layer 0 that you had created before. Your screen will now look something like this.

Step 5. Adjust the image so you get the desired effect by either moving it or by scaling until you get the effect you want, i.e. the important image details are not covered.

Step 6. Now choose the Slice tool and create slices by “cutting along the border of the thumbnail image. Also do this for each thumbnail box. You will notice that the slices will be automatically assigned numbers as you go along.

Step 7. When you’re done with all the slices, go to File, Save for Web & Devices.

In the menu box that opens, select jpg, high as the format and click, Save. In the next dialogue box, give your file a name and be sure to save it in a new folder.

Choose Images Only as format and All User Slices. This will ensure that Photoshop will just save the boxed slices and not the background.

Step 8. Upload these images as an album in Facebook and you’re done. Note. If the images do not display in the proper order, it is very simple to reorder them just by choosing and dragging. You can refer to your Photoshop image for guidance.

That’s all there is to it. I hope you found this tutorial useful and instructive. Have fun with your next project.