Making a "mosaic" effect in php & javascript

Question

I'm trying to create a mosaic type script in Javascript and PHP, which makes up a big image with many different images made from small square tiles. The idea was to "fake" the effect by having a background image and laying over the tiles on top of it, and making their opacity 50% or so. This works decently enough, but it definitely doesn't look as good as I want.

My question is, does anyone have any recommendations on alternatives to this method? I know there are definitely ways to do this in Flash, such as the Mario Lemieux mosaic: http://www.mariomosaic.com/mosaic/

But I would like to avoid flash if possible.

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edit: added live example

So I haven't touched the JS layer yet, this has all been server-side stuff. There's no pre-loader or anything really in terms of making it more usable, that will come soon. But here's what I've got so far:

http://www.mtimofiiv.net/mosaic_example/

The little tiny image tiles are created from images uploaded by a user, and they're run through a class I've built to generate them. I used GD2 to make them grayscale so they will absorb the color of the background image better, and I "pixelated" the background image in Photoshop.

If anyone wants to see any part of the code let me know and I'll add it to this post. Also when this project's done I intend to make it available on Github in its entirety for whoever wants to do the same.

Answer 1

Perhaps the fact that your demo HTML is 733KB might dissuade you from this particular approach. I think if you want to do something like this, you really ought to employ the canvas element, and work in some kind of "ajax" loading. That could actually be kind of interesting. However, if you are going to generate this much HTML...you might consider having a client-side script do it, if possible. Just some thoughts...