Recombining images that were "Split into Tiles"

I don't have any commercial software to combine the tiles output into a single image. And wouldn't know where to begin in any case.

Is there a tutorial or easy-to-use free or low-cost solution to do this?

Thank You

It looks like ImageMagick should be able to do this:
http://www.imagemagick.org/script/index.php

I haven't used it myself -- I always use Photoshop for tasks like this. It used to be very expensive but they now have a quite affordable Photography subscription for around $10/month.

Edit: Have a look at GIMP which is an open-source alternative for Photoshop.

The technical term for this is "stitching". Search the web for "image stitching" to find tutorials and software.

Yes, that is how I started. The ones I found expect a list of "overlapping" photos and look for reference points to warp and stitch them into a single image. I actually used to do that at my job. I didn't have much luck with my fractals.

I am hoping someone has a tutorial of sorts. Seems like it should be an easy thing to do...But not for me! LOL

Thanks for the response!

I found this discussion on a Gimp forum: Link

It might give you a sporting chance of stitching your tiles without too much faffing about. I haven't tested the advice myself because I don't use that software but the principle seems to be the same: open one image, extend canvas size, add second image and drag so that it butts up to the first. Rinse and repeat as required.

That's the sort of procedure I would use. Usually a good image editor will "snap" one image or layer up to another as if they are magnetic so you don't even have to be terribly accurate with your dragging & dropping. Gimp does have a snap feature so that will help if you can find how to activate it.

The only slight hitch is that the discussion is four years old now so I hope the program/interface/menus haven't changed too much since then. Good luck!

Sounds promising and just the sort of thing I was looking for. Thank You!

In case you need to do this more often, you may want to take a look at Frederik's suggestion of ImageMagick, after all: Combining a matrix of images can be as simple as executing

magick montage -geometry 200x200 -tile 3x3 Tile*.png Output.png

This assumes the tiles are to be arranged in a 3×3 grid and their size should be 200×200 pixels in the combined image. By default, they are arranged by row (i.e. the first three images would constitute the first row etc.), so the * syntax should work as long as your images are named like this:

Tile_0_0.png  Tile_0_1.png  Tile_0_2.png
Tile_1_0.png  Tile_1_1.png  Tile_1_2.png
Tile_2_0.png  Tile_2_1.png  Tile_2_2.png

If this is not the case, you can write a text file listing the images in the expected order and use

magick montage -geometry 200x200 -tile 3x3 @Tiles.txt Output.png

For example, if your tiles have the column dimension first, i.e.

Tile_0_0.png  Tile_1_0.png  Tile_2_0.png
Tile_0_1.png  Tile_1_1.png  Tile_2_1.png
Tile_0_2.png  Tile_1_2.png  Tile_2_2.png

your text file should look like this:

Tile_0_0.png
Tile_1_0.png
Tile_2_0.png
Tile_0_1.png
Tile_1_1.png
Tile_2_1.png
Tile_0_2.png
Tile_1_2.png
Tile_2_2.png

Of course, there may be better ways to deal with that – you could check out some options on this page of examples for an older version.

Last year I was looking for a solution for this same problem. My requirements were also the option to join tiles for the biggest image size currently supported by Ultra Fractal, i.e. 99999x99999. That's around 28GiB of data in uncompressed form in 24bit RGB and 37GiB in 32bit RGBA.

ImageMagick has an option to perform the operations directly on disk at the expense of speed but I wasn't able to finalize the process. Then I gived a try to another less known package called libvips. This software can also perform operations directly in the disk but with much better results than ImageMagick. I was able to join my splitted images taking about 10 minutes each (my system is a bit old).

I've created a Python script to perform this task with the Ultra Fractal Files. The prerequisites to use it are Python, libvips library, and pyvips (Python binding to access libvips from Python). If there is anyone interested the script is here with comments describing its operation

https://pastebin.com/4fipXC5S

If you are not familiar with Python and do not require to join very big images you can probably obtain good results using ImageMagick.

Enjoy!

I use Piclab to combine UF tiles. It's freeware and runs through a DOS window. It's old and simple, but it supports batch operations and does what I need.

http://www.s-4.com/download/

@clamas I'm really curious now about what use case gave you the requirement to combine several 10-gigapixel images...

To anyone in need of processing gigapixel images but unfamiliar with Python, I can recommend NetPBM. This package of tools is over 30 years old and operates on similarly ancient and rather wasteful graphics formats, but its advantage is that it does this line by line, so that despite the "waste", memory size is usually not a problem. Unfortunately, users of Windows will need Cygwin to run a reasonably recent version of NetPBM, so it's not as easy as using ImageMagick.

Admittedly, my own use case is limited at combining a 3-gigapixel image: This "night-time Google Maps" site of mine is based on imagery that first needs to be combined and later, after further processing, be split into a zillion little tiles. The combining step for the six constituent images (named night_0_0.pam etc.) is as simple as:

pamundice night_%1d_%1a.pam -across=3 -down=2 > combined.pam

Of course, this means that before and after, conversion of images to and from .pam is needed, but the package brings its own programs for that.

Thanks...I will give it a try. Just haven't had much time to work on them lately. Seems all the best solutions people have given me are command-line based. Seems like they could incorporate this into Ultra Fractal without much effort. Maybe in the next upgrade?!

Thanks Again
WKCook

Is there any specific reason for rendering in tiles if you want a single image to begin with? Not having tiles is the default in UF.

Images over a certain size can only be rendered as tiles.

Wow! None of mine are that large but that is cool. Haven't been able to spend much time on UltraFractal recently but will look into this. Thank You.

The only time UF denied rendering something for me was when I tried to render something twice the size of 32k (61440 x 17280 pixels). I can freely render 30720 x 17280 (which is 64x the amount of pixels in a 4k monitor).

That being said, if they're too large to be rendered in one piece by UF, then other tools tend to have difficulties too. The only obvious exception I found was rendering separate layers into a .psd which has a 2 GB file size limit, but then can be comibined in Photoshop and saved as .psb.

Imagemagick is a great tool, it's what I use too for such purposes.