Review: Microsoft Research AutoCollage 2008

A screenshot of Microsoft Research AutoCollage 2008's simple interface

In the last few days, a new program has arrived from Microsoft that allows you to stitch your photos to automatically create a wonderful looking collages. While its possible to manually stick together your photos using other programs, and there’s heaps of programs with similar features, AutoCollage 2008 takes collages to a new level with seamless stitching together pictures in magic ways in a rather fast automatic process. However, the limitation of only being forced to use at least 7 large pictures to make the collages is annoying, and the fact that it costs US$20 for people in America and bizarrly in parallel is US$40 in the UK takes the luster of what would otherwise be a wonderful program for everyday use.

When you first open AutoCollage, you can open up a folder storing your photos using the image browser to see them layed out in front of you. The program accepts most major file formats but as I mentioned previously, your limited to larger images in order to create the minimum sized 4″ by 6″ landscape shot. It would have been nice to make smaller sized montages; I guess if I really wanted to I could increase the size of all my photos to accommodate AutoCollage and then shrink the final product to conpensate for this, but such a simple feature should have been included by default. In addition to this, you need to have at least 7 pictures to make a collage, and although the final result is rather spectacular considering the entire process is automatic, I question whether they would be that much worse if I’d only included 6 images.

This is a collage that I put together using pictures from my Samples folder with AutoCollage 2008. As you can see, the program does a great job of working out the important elements of a picture and stitches them together extremely well.

Once you have your image collection sorted out, you hit the create button where the magic all happens. AutoCollage appears to utilise Microsoft’s in-house PhotoSynth technology which is able to distinguish objects and faces in all of your pictures. The end result after the relatively short process looks stunning, with backgrounds of images seamlessly fading into other images, and objects of importance seeming to stand out in the finished product.

However, while I’m very impressed with what AutoCollage is able to achieve, I’m not happy with the fact that Microsoft are charging for this in the first place. Even if they didn’t want to release this for free, strapping this onto one of their Live products or into Office would have been a nice refresher. However, the fact their charging US$20 in America and US$40 in the UK (why their making this price discrepancy is beyond my thinking) for what otherwise should have been a free product really sours a great program. You can download a free 30-day trial of the software here, but honestly, that’s as far as I’m going with this program.

The Final Word: The reason why I’m putting this in Lijonoli Picks is to let people know that this wonderful program for automatically creating collages exists. It does what it advertises itself to do with stunning fashion, but with Microsoft Research charging for it and the small features they left out which would have increased my use of this program tenfold, I personally am not too keen on making the purchase. I recommend that you download the trial, enjoy the features, then wait for Microsoft Research to release it for free.

Review Score: 3/5 (Average Pick)