Microsoft Research AutoCollage

Some customers acquiring new computers with Windows 7 will have a welcome surprise: they will receive a pre-installed and pre-registered copy of Microsoft Research AutoCollage Touch 2009, an advanced computer vision and image processing program which automatically creates collages of your pictures. This application showcases the same AutoCollage technology previously available through Microsoft Research AutoCollage 2008. However, the user experience has been modified to also showcase the touch and multi-touch capabilities of Windows 7.

AutoCollage Touch 2009 is not an upgrade to the previously released AutoCollage 2008 versions. While the user license for AutoCollage 2008 allowed customers to use their acquired product key to register the application on up to 5 machines, the license for AutoCollage Touch 2009 cannot be transferred from the machine in which it came pre-installed. At this time, AutoCollage Touch 2009 is only available pre-installed by OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers).

Customers that acquired AutoCollage 2008 from the Microsoft Store will continue to be supported by the Microsoft Research Community forum, and by the support email address for that application (acfeed at Microsoft.com). Meanwhile, customers that receive AutoCollate Touch 2009 pre-installed on a new machine should seek support through their OEM. The following page contains links to the contact information for OEM support teams: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/cambridge/projects/autocollage/support.aspx

You used Microsoft Research AutoCollage 2008 to create a beautiful set of collages, and now want those to shuffle in your desktop background every 30 minutes? That is made easy by the Windows 7 Slide Show desktop background. By default, AutoCollage will save collages to a single folder under the standard “My Pictures” folder. The instructions below assume you want to use the collages saved to this default location for your desktop background:

1.       Open the properties menu for the Windows 7 desktop and select the menu item Personalize. This will bring up the page “Control Panel\Appearance and Personalization\Personalization”.

2.       Down on the page, click on the Desktop Background link. This will bring up the page “Control Panel\Appearance and Personalization\Personalization\Desktop Background”.

3.       Click the Browse… button and on the “Browse For Folder” dialog expand the folder with your account name, and under it expand the “My Pictures” folder. You should then see the folder named “AutoCollage”. Select that folder and press OK.

4.       At this point you will have all the pictures in the AutoCollage folder selected to appear in the background slide show. You may remove some pictures from the slide show and also change other properties, like if the pictures will appear in the name sequence or shuffle, the picture position and the interval for picture changes. After setting the slide show properties press Save changes.

5.       Your selected AutoCollages are now part of the “Unsaved Theme”. Click on the Save Theme link under the “My Themes” section and name the theme.

The collages will now appear in a slide show in your desktop background. That is already great, but there is another Windows 7 feature that makes it easy to share a theme with family and friends. Once you create a theme, just bring up the properties menu –right-clicking over the theme on the theme list – and select the menu item Save theme for sharing. You will then be able to save the theme as a file with the extension .themepack. All you need to do afterwards is to send this single file to friends and family also using Windows 7. All that those receiving your .themepack file have to do is to double-click on it to have the theme added to their gallery, and set as their background slide show!

Customers using version 1.1 of AutoCollage will notice that this update will no longer lock files corresponding to the input images being shown by the application. As a consequence of this, before creating a new AutoCollage, the application will verify if the “Date modified” for each of the input images is more recent than the date/time when the file was last loaded. If that is the case, the input image is “refreshed”. A possible side-effect of this approach is that application may keep trying to refresh an input image that has the “Date modified” mistakenly set in the future. While uncommon, files with “Date modified” set in the future are at times created by the process to import a photo from a digital camera, mainly if the import process finishes with errors.

If you face a scenario in which AutoCollage is not finishing the process to create a collage, verify if any of the input files has a “Date modified” set in the future,  by looking at the file properties (right-click the file and choose the menu item “Properties”). A file with this problem can be easily fixed by opening it in any common image editor and saving back over the original file (Microsoft Paint is available in most Windows environments, and will properly fix this issue).