Welcome to wallmerge!
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wallmerge is an online tool for members of
The Lomographic Society.
It will allow anyone with a
Lomohome
to create a profile wall made up of just one image.
A profile wall looks like this:
+-------------------+----+----+----+----+
| | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
| |----|----|----|----|
| | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 |
| KEY |----|----|----|----|
| | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 |
| |----|----|----|----|
| | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 |
+-------------------+----+----+----+----+
Each section represents an image. The 'Key' image is what everyone else sees when you sign their guest book or post in
on the main site's news feed. The 16 smaller images are intended to be a mini showcase of your photographic prowess.
wallmerge allows you to upload a photo which will will then be split into 17 separate images (the 'Key' image and the
16 tiles), which you can then upload to your Lomohome to give the
impression that your profile wall is made up of one big image like this:
+---------------------------------------+
| 1 2 3 4 |
| |
| 5 6 7 8 |
| KEY |
| 9 10 11 12 |
| |
| 13 14 15 16 |
+---------------------------------------+
There are a few things you need to do before you can process your wall. All is explained on the next page.
So what are you waiting for? Let's go create your wall!
About wallmerge:
Hi, I'm Jonic and I made wallmerge :o)
Wallmerge came into being because I used to be an active member of
The Lomographic Society.
My username was jonic_the_hedgehog
if you're interested in taking a peek at my home.
Although it had been done before I, along with a few other people, started using the wallmerge effect on my Lomohome.
Knowing that (at the time) I made web sites for a living I used to get a lot of questions about how I achieved the effect.
So much so that I decided to write a tutorial.
The tutorial was ok for a time, but it was badly written and I ended up getting more questions asking me to explain
things a little more clearly.
So I rewrote the tutorial and bundled some sample files and Photoshop actions with it. The actions did half of the
job so the tutorial only had to be half as long. But it still wasn't good enough.
Meanwhile I was learning PHP, and while trying to think of a
project to work on to develop my ability to program I thought about the Lomography site and how it worked. I
initially toyed with the idea of creating an online gallery of my own, until I discovered the
GD graphics processing library that is built into PHP.
After finding out a little more about it, and what it could do for me it suddenly hit me that the Lomo site
itself uses the very same library to process uploaded photographs to generate thumbnails and perform other such miracles.
I figured that if the GD library enabled Lomo to create thumbnails then I could use it to create profile walls
without anything more than uploading the source image to a web site.
At that precise moment wallmerge was born.
I got to work on the first version of wallmerge with a little four months PHP experience behind me. It started out
great, but was a little too centered on how great I was for creating it. I scrapped that one and released a second
version, this time with a log in system for retrieving already processed walls because my hosting account was rapidly running out
of disk space. The only problem was it was crap. I won't even bore you with version three because it was even worse than
version two. I'm on version four now (4.1 I guess), and now I've got more of a hold on CSS and PHP I think this is
most likely going to be the final version.
If you have any comments or questions about wallmerge or how I made it do all these magical things then
Please email me!
Thanks for taking the time to read this, and have fun with wallmerge!
Jonic.
