Billion photos spread for Church News

For the June 29th issue of Church news I laid out the below spread. Read on if you would like to know more about the process I used for producing the photo-collage in the background.

Final layout published in the LDS Church News June 29, 2014.

The Process

I downloaded over 200 photos from familysearch.org. Used search terms like "grandpa" and "grandma." Then the thought occurred to me to try states names as key search terms. I started with "Alabama" then "Utah." I found everything I needed. And, yes, I chose  photos completely at random. My only criteria is that the photo was somewhat clear/crisp and no documents.

Dilemma

With all these photos the monumental task of creating a huge photo collage became apparent. time restrictions and deadlines made manually placing each photo an impossibility. I searched for a solution within photoshop. I have no doubt there is some kind of plugin out there that would do the job, but I met with no success in this regard. Then I began searching free online collage generators.

The free online solution

After searching through 4 or 5 of them I came across photocollage.net. This site had exactly what I was looking for. a collage generator that produced a random mess of photos. The only downside was that it would only generate a max of 25 photos at a time. So I did 8 batches of 25 photos, producing 8 .PNG images. There was some minor resizing and repositioning of some of the photos online, but the time needed to do this was acceptable.

One of the 8 smaller photo collage images downloaded form photocollage.net.
Yes, there are at least 2 photos of my grandpa included in the collage of photos is in the final spread.

Finishing up in Photoshop

I created a document of the appropriate dimensions for the layout. Then I simply placed all 8 images, positioned them to bleed off the side of the canvas, and "Yahvole!", I had my massive Photo-collage for use in the background of my layout. The Editor and others were imprtessed.

The final collage before placement in layout.

If you're interested here is a link to the story by R. Scott Lloyd. I find it amazing the revolution that is taking place in digital online family history. Even cooler is some of those first billion photos uploaded were uploaded by myself. I'm a small part of something truly amazing.