VincentCheung.ca Blog

Today marks the official 1 year anniversary of Shape Collage Inc!

We just had our 1 millionth download!!! Amazing!

When I started Shape Collage, I didn’t think that other people would actually use it, let alone a million people! I am shocked and greatly humbled by your support. I am extremely thankful for each and every one of Shape Collage’s users. There are some exciting things in the pipeline and I hope that you will continue to enjoy using Shape Collage!

Vincent Cheung
Founder, CEO, and Janitor

The Shape Collage Facebook App has been released!

Create photo collages in different shapes from your pictures in Facebook with just 2 mouse clicks and a couple of seconds!

Just like the collage above, you can mouse over the little pictures in the collage to see a preview of it and you click on a picture to go to the full Facebook photo page where you can comment, etc. It’s a great way to browse photos on Facebook really quickly!

If you like the collage that you created, you can save it to your Facebook photo album and tag your friends in the collage.

Try it out!

Shape Collage Online has been released!

Create photo collages right in your browser without having to download anything! Use pictures from anywhere on the Internet for the collages.

Mousing over the pictures in the collage will show you a preview of the picture and clicking on it will take you to the full sized picture or the page that was linked to in the original source. Try this on different websites like Flickr, Google Image Search, YouTube, Amazon, and eBay.

Shape Collage 2.5 has been released!

Shape Collage is used by people from all over the world and has now been translated into Deutsch, English, Español, Français, Italiano, Magyar, Nederlands, ภาษาไทย, 中文 (简体), 中文 (繁體), 日本語, and 한국어 thanks to Helmut, Hardy, Coco, Michele, Zityi, Huberto, Anchan, Annie, Miso, and JaeHyung!

If you would like to help translate Shape Collage into another language, please send an email to support@shapecollage.com

With this release, creating collages is even faster than before! Shape Collage 2.5 is up to 100X faster for collages with hundreds or thousands of photos! Also, as requested, more preset shapes have been included in the program and a shape gallery has been created. Several bugs have been squashed in this release and additional helpful warnings have been added, such as when you have inadvertently used settings that would result in a ginormous collage too big to fit on your computer.

Shape Collage continues to be free for personal use and allows you to automatically create beautiful looking photo collages in any shape you want with just a few mouse clicks, but for advanced and commercial users, we introduce Shape Collage Pro, which adds advanced features over the existing free version and permits the use of the software for commercial purposes. The “Pro” version lets you save and load projects so you can save all the photos used for a particular collage along with all the program settings and load them at a later time. Shape Collage Pro also lets you save collages in Adobe Photoshop PSD file format where each photo is in its own layer, allowing you to open up the collage in an external image editing program such as Photoshop or GIMP and manually move photos around, change the ordering of the photos, change the size of the photos, apply filters, etc. Purchasing Shape Collage Pro supports the development of the program so that we can continue to bring new features and improvements to the program (there are still many more to come!). There will be free upgrades to future versions, so you will gain access to these new features when they become available by purchasing now!

This is what you get with Shape Collage Pro:

No watermarks

• Make beautiful collages that you can print out in high resolution

Save as Adobe Photoshop PSD file

• Move photos manually in Photoshop or GIMP

Save and Load Projects

• Save all your photos and settings for later
• Create collage templates

Commercial License

• Create collages to complement your photography business

Free upgrades

• Future upgrades are free

Support the development of Shape Collage

Shape Collage 2.5 Release Notes
Aug. 12, 2009

New Features

• Translated into Deutsch, English, Español, Français, Italiano, Magyar, Nederlands, ภาษาไทย, 中文 (简体), 中文 (繁體), 日本語, 한국어
• Added additional preset shapes
• Added the ability to save and load projects

Enhancements

• Faster algorithm (a lot faster for lots of photos)
• Resizable window
• Improved performance when adding custom masks and background photos

Bugs

• Fixed bug with PSD files so that they can now be opened in GIMP 2.5 and later
• Fixed bug with the drop shadow not changing after previewing the collage
• Better handling of collages where some photos could not be read
• Added warning when attempting to create extremely large collages
• Fixed bug when the photo size is set larger than the collage size
• The thumbnail views of the custom shape and background photo now properly show the whole thumbnail

Here’s a video that I created that shows the main features of Shape Collage:

Shape Collage 2.1 has been released!

There’s a couple new features in this release, some performance tweaks, and some bug fixes. One really cool new feature is the ability to add photos from the web to use in collages! Just select “Add photos from web” in the File menu or by right-clicking the photo box and then enter a webpage that has pictures and Shape Collage will automatically download the pictures from that page for the collage! It works for any webpage that has pictures in it, like Flickr, Picasa Web Albums, Google Image Search, YouTube, CNN, Time.com, The Huffington Post, stuffonmycat.com, or xkcd. This works surprisingly well and fast (thanks to some tricks that I used).

Note that it will only grab the photos on the page that you give it. In fact, it will try to grab every image on the webpage that you give it, so you will usually have to remove some of the irrelevant ones. Shape Collage will not crawl websites looking for photos. This feature also doesn’t work for sites that require you to login, so you are out of luck if you want to use this with Facebook. Maybe try this instead for Facebook.

As before, Shape Collage automatically creates beautiful looking photo collages in any shape you want with just a few mouse clicks in under a minute and is free for personal use!

These are the big highlights in this release:

• Use photos from the web
  • Just enter the link to a webpage with photos to use them in a collage
• More customization
  • Adjust the photo rotations by setting the range of allowable rotations
  • Adjust the direction of the drop shadows and optionally, remove the shadow
• Faster
  • More multithreading for increased speed
  • More responsive when adding a large number of photos to the photo box
• Better stability
  • Error checking for images that cannot be read properly
  • Miscellaneous bug fixes

Shape Collage 2.1 Release Notes
Feb. 27, 2009

New Features

• Add photos from the web
• Added options to adjust the amount of rotation of the photos
• Added options to adjust the drop shadows of the photos
• The program settings are automatically saved between sessions

Enhancements

• Multithreading of the initialization procedure for increased speed
• Adding photos for the collage is more responsive, especially when adding a large number of photos
• Added support for transparency for loading masks from a file
• Increased efficiency for collages with multiple copies of the same photo
• The help menu now redirects to the help page on the website
• Added menu item to show examples of collages

Bugs

• Added error handling for image read errors during the collage creation
• Fixed bug when the photo size was set to “Auto” and the “Make all photos the same size” option was unchecked
• Fixed bug when the text or custom shape mask was blank
• Added error handling for attempts to save the collage to a location without write access
• Added the ability to create the necessary directories for the collage save file

Shape Collage has been written about in at least 22 languages! Here’s a small sampling of sites from around the world talking about Shape Collage. I arbitrarily chose sites that either had nice collages or gave me a lot of traffic and they are ordered under each language approximately as to when the page appeared, with the oldest first.

English

• gHacks
• Apple
• Chris Pirillo (YouTube video)
• Cameratown (YouTube video)
• Idenzine
• Softonic
• MacReviewCast (Podcast)
• AddictiveTips
• Techblissonline
• PhotographyBlog
• Rj Dollen (Cool art using Shape Collage)
• Digital Inspiration
• Lifehacker
• TWIP
• MacHeist (Where’s Waldo)
• Macbreak Weekly (Podcast @ 1:33:45)

Spanish

• chickageek
• GeeksRoom
• Geek.ms
• Softonic
• UpToDown
• Visual Beta
• TechnoBITA
• Entrebits
• Nivmar
• Sebalorenzo
• TecnoBITA
• Jorge Serrano
• arturogoga (YouTube)

Portuguese

• Baixaki (Screencast)
• Misto Quente
• bernabauer.com
• WinAjuda

Italian

• maestroalberto
• ManuIdea
• Pucciom
• Gekissimo
• Click|blog.it
• guidami
• ilarialab.com
• Tutto Volume
• polycoke
• Il Bloggatore

Chinese

• Pobby-dog Blog
• Jinn’s Blog
• Lawrence’s Coffee Shop
• unkb.com
• UIUI
• Hong Kong Yahoo Blogs (wedding photos in the shape of a heart)
  • jw
  • p4pinky_yip
  • mobe_yuen
  • Katherine FanFan
  • fatpofatpo
  • mscaca1202
  • tracy_007hk

Japanese

• Oshiete-Kun
• Gigafree
• yknakamimi
• hatena
• Nutspress
• Lifehacker.jp
• Moongift
• National Creators Conference

Korean

• SimFilePC
• Krang
• Drchoi Blog
• WalkPC

French

• fdoun
• Cyrille Borne
• Vincent Dutrait
• Glandouillage
• MaxiApple
• Guppytrucs Freeware
• ZDNet.fr

German

• Roman bloggt
• Gif-Bilder
• drweb.de
• Apfel
• Ehrensenf (Video)
• Blogwiese

Russian

• Lexi_Ru
• Russian Apple Community
• Deep Apple
• Fotokolo
• baboker (Video)
• catode

Polish

• PC blog
• Programosy
• Fotomaniak
• Fotopolis
• Skrzypol

Romanian

• Catholica NETwork
• Topo’s Page
• efoto

Hungarian

• beszeljukmac
• Techline
• kepszerkesztok
• szoftverbazis
• Sablonos Blog

Turkish

• TurkMac
• pdfdergi

Dutch

• PhotoPlace.nl
• Clickx
• fotoplezier
• Kindje op Komst

Finnish

• DigiCamera

Malay

• Syamsu
• Agusbagus

Serbian

• Serbain Macintosh User Group

Swedish

• dahlstroms
• stationsvakt
• Veronicas Foto

Arabic

• Rehla Online
• SUAE

Icelandic

• sfjalar

Latvian

• Bedre
• LatFoto

Shape Collage 2.0 has been released!

A lot of new features have been added in this release, so many that I skipped version 1.1 and went right to 2.0 . As before, Shape Collage automatically creates beautiful looking photo collages in any shape you want with just a few mouse clicks in under a minute and is free for personal use!

These are the big highlights in this release:

• Photo box 
  • Drag and drop photos into the photo box to add photos for the collage
  • Remove photos from the box that you don’t want in the collage
• Faster
  • Improved rendering procedures means that your collage gets made faster
  • Multithreaded for even more speed with multi-core systems
• Better layouts
  • Improved algorithm for placing photos in the collage
• More customization
  • Change the font and add symbols for text shape collages
  • Use a photo as the background
  • Change the colour and size of the photo borders

Shape Collage 2.0 Release Notes
Dec. 1, 2008

New Features

• Added drag and drop capabilities to add photos for the collage
• Added ability to choose which photos appear in the collage via the photo drop box
• Added ability to rotate the photos in the photo drop box
• Added option to select a background colour or photo
• Added option to change the colour and size of the photo borders
• Added a preview image of the photo with its border
• Added option to change the font and style for text shapes
• Added a character map to easily add symbols for text shapes
• The size of the collage and photos can now be specified in units of pixels, inches, cm, or font size
• Multithreaded for increased speed

Enhancements

• The “Watch layout animation” option now comes into effect immediately, even if the layout is currently occurring
• The Exif orientation metadata tag in jpeg images is now read and used to appropriately rotate the photos
• Improved layout creation so that the photos stay within the bounds of the shape
• Extended the “jagged boundary” option to all the different collage shapes
• Added support for GIF images in collages
• Increased performance with images with non-sRGB color profiles
• Improved image resizing quality
• Reduced the memory requirement of saving as a PSD, so extremely large collages can be created when saving as a PSD

Interface

• Added a status bar to provide help and info
• Changed the sliders to combined sliders and spinners
• Added a scroll bars on the application for screens with small resolution
• Alerts users when attempting to use a transparent background and saving as a jpeg
• Displays a thumbnail of the custom shape mask on the main interface
• Shows previews of photos and masks when loading images
• Added a file menu items for executing tasks

Bugs

• Fixed a bug in writing RLE images in PSD
• Fixed the anti-aliasing of photo edges in JDK 1.5
• Fixed a divide by zero error in the layout
• Fixed a numerical stability error in the layout
• Safely handles custom masks of size 0
• Safely handles images that cannot be properly read
• Correctly determines the appropriate size of the photo for the layout

The new version of JavaScript Encryption and Decryption is out!

Try it:
Show encrypted text  (the decryption key is: password)

The new encryption code is a lot faster than the old version and the webpage decryption code now uses a fancy dialog box to ask you for the key. The entire process has been greatly simplified and the encryption page will automatically generate code that you can copy and paste into your website.

Note: the new version is not backwards compatible with the old version

JavaScript Encryption and Decryption 2.0 Release Notes:
Nov. 27, 2008

• Faster
• Automatically generates HTML code for your website
• Fancy dialog box to ask you for the key
• Simpler to use and more examples
• Fixed bugs with Internet Explorer