This App Will Turn Your Photos Into A Beautiful Mosaic

Beautiful Mosaic ($0.99) by Bucket Labs is a fun little app for sprucing up your photos. If you want something besides filters on your images, how about turning them into unique mosaics?

Photo apps are definitely one of my favorite types of apps to look for, but it’s hard to deny that the market has been getting a bit stale lately. Although my faith did get restored a bit lately thanks to Waterlogue, and I’ve been eyeing the apps that turn your photos into unique pieces of art instead of the standard artsy-filter stuff. And Beautiful Mosaic is another playful app to add to your photo editing toolbox.

The first thing you’ll find when you launch the app is a screen that is split in half: the top will show you the Camera Roll, with newest images at the top, and the bottom has two large buttons for importing an image. This screen may look a bit convoluted at first, but it’s part of the style of the app itself. Rather than go with a simple interface, Beautiful Mosaic went with a more abstract, pop style with the buttons and menus. It’s fun, as the app was meant to be.

Beautiful Mosaic allows quick access to the Camera Roll from the get-go, but you can also import any image from your device Photo Library as well. And if you choose to capture a new image, you can switch between the front and rear-facing cameras, as well as use the flash. When you have your image, the fun begins.

By default, the first mosaic tile will be applied to your image, but there are many more to choose from. You can scroll horizontally along the bottom to view the different tiles that are available to you, and tapping on one will apply it directly to the image. You can also adjust the size of the tiles with the slider above the style selector, and the changes will be rendered as you make them. Depending on the style, size, and image resolution, some will be faster than others, but the process really doesn’t take more than a few seconds.

In addition to just turning the entire image into a mosaic, there is the “Mosaic Canvas” option, which has several things you can do. First, you can draw and erase on the original image, and whatever you “paint” on will become mosaic. There is also the automatic face detection option if you want to “blur” out people’s faces.

The next step, once you get your mosaic lines drawn, will be to select the background. There’s a wide variety of solids, gradients, and patterned backgrounds to choose from, and this will be applied to the un-mosaic area of the image. And finally, the last step is to make any adjustments to the result, such as brightness, contrast, saturation, and opacity. Once these are taken care of, you’ll be back at the regular style screen, where you can change the mosaic style of the canvas.

When you’re done creating your mosaic, you can tap on the “Share” button to save it to your Camera Roll, post on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, or even just open it in another app for further editing.

I’m really enjoying Beautiful Mosaic so far, and it’s a great addition to the creative photo editing app market. I just wish that the app included a way to save a certain resolution, because there isn’t such a setting right now. Hopefully it’s added in the future.

Another slight problem I had with the app was the fact that the face detection didn’t seem to work well for me. I snapped a new portrait of myself with the front-facing camera, and tried to have it detect my face with no success. I’m not sure what the requirements are for the face detection to work, but it should be improved, or at least tell the user the angle or position the algorithm will actually work with.

Despite these minor setbacks, I recommend checking out Beautiful Mosaic if you are looking for something fun to enhance your photos with. You can get it in the App Store as a now universal download for $0.99.