I’m a big fan of photo mosaics, which are basically designs and artwork made from actual photos. But it is undoubtedly an arduous task to arrange your photos so that it simulates a given design. Pixable, a startup that allows you to photo books and calendars from your pictures on the web, is launching a nifty new feature today that allows you to make mosaics from your picture easily. And the bonus: you can print the mosaics for a steal. The first 50 TechCrunch readers to order a mosaic poster will receive a free print by entering the code “50TC.”
On Pixable’s site, you can import your photos from Facebook, Flickr, Picasa and Photobucket into the mosaic creator. Via Facebook Connect, Pixable will pull in your photos spceifically from the social network. The image, photo or logo which is the template for the mosaic must be imported as a JPG files. So you can make a mocais from a logo, picture, landscape and more. You can share your photo books online and on Facebook. The actual photo mosaic prints are currently offered in 14” x 11” and 17” x 11” sizes, which are prices at $7.99 and $9.99, respectively. The poster is printed on acid free card stock and laminated with a UV coating.
Founded by 3 MIT graduate students, Pixable’s service allows people to use of all their Facebook and image sharing site photo content like captions, tagging information, comments, and birthdays to make albums, slidehows, calendars and nor artwork. Pixable’s browser-based simplifies the creation of albums, making it easy to use for anyone. The startup has raised over $500,000 from angel investors and has an advisory of notable entrepreneurrs including Ofoto founder and xMarks CEO James Joaquin.
Pixable is wise to leverage Facebook to showcase its technology, as Facebook is becoming the most popular site for doewnloading photos among consumers. As we learned recently, with 400 million users, Facebook is seeing 2.5 billion photos uploaded every month. With compelling features such as the mosaic tool, Pixable will continue to allow the social network’s users to do innovative things with it pictures. I guess it’s only a matter of time before Facebook begins to implement some of these technologies in-house.