Photo as tile pattern.
Square, rounded, circle, or diamond tiles, sized and spaced to taste. Pick the grout color to suit. Subway tile, pixel art, mosaic-art reference, sticker-sheet patterns. Nothing uploads. For real mosaic art, get tiles and grout.
Turn a photo into a tile mosaic
Rebuild a photo as a grid of tiles, where every tile takes the colour of the photo underneath it.
What you can change
- Tile shape
- Tile colour
- Tile size
- Grout
- Grout colour
How it works
- 01Drop in a photo, or open one of the samples.
- 02Pick the tile shape — square, rounded, circle or diamond — and whether a tile takes the average colour or the dominant one, then set tile size, grout width and grout colour.
- 03Download it at full resolution. Nothing is uploaded — the work happens in this browser tab.
Mixing the grout…
Turn a photo into a tile mosaic
Rebuild a photo as a grid of tiles, where every tile takes the colour of the photo underneath it.
What you can change
- Tile shape
- Tile colour
- Tile size
- Grout
- Grout colour
How it works
- 01Drop in a photo, or open one of the samples.
- 02Pick the tile shape — square, rounded, circle or diamond — and whether a tile takes the average colour or the dominant one, then set tile size, grout width and grout colour.
- 03Download it at full resolution. Nothing is uploaded — the work happens in this browser tab.
Mixing the grout…
Six places tiles beat pixels
- 01 for design
A subway-tile photo for a renovation moodboard
Considering a new tile pattern for a bathroom? Run a photo of the room — or even an inspiration photo from another bathroom — through square tile mode at small size with white grout. The mosaic shows what subway-tiled walls would look like at the actual scale of the space.
- 02 for posters
A pixel-art-feel band poster
Big tiles + black grout color = pixel-art aesthetic for a flyer or poster. Drop a portrait through with 30px tiles, black gaps, square shape. Looks like 8-bit chiptune-era graphic without a sprite editor.
- 03 for tile work
A reference image for actual mosaic art
Real mosaic artists use pixelated reference images to work out tile placement. Generate a mosaic preview at the tile count you'll use (count rows/columns of your physical tiles), print, work tile-by-tile from the printout. Saves a lot of squinting at a blurry source.
- 04 for ig
A scroll-stopping pattern post
IG carousel posts that look like 'a single image at first, then turns out to be a tile pattern' get saves. Pair the mosaic effect with a 1:1 crop and your account picks up a pattern-content niche.
- 05 for prints
Wall art that reads as photo from far, pixels up close
A 24×36 print of a mosaic'd photo reads as the original image from across a room and as colored tiles up close. Same trick fancy bathrooms use, applied to a printable. Frame it.
- 06 for stickers
A pattern-strip for sticker sheets
Run a photo through with 10px circle tiles + 4px gap. The result reads as a dot-pattern sticker sheet. Great for journal washi-strips or scrapbook accents — print, hand-cut into strips, glue.
Frequently asked
Does the photo upload anywhere? +
No. The tile sampling and rendering both run in your browser. Your photo never touches our servers — we don't run an image pipeline at all.
How is this different from Pixelate? +
Pixelate fills every pixel of each cell with a flat color edge-to-edge. Mosaic leaves gaps between cells, fillable with a 'grout' color. The gap is what reads as 'tile' instead of 'low-resolution'. Adjust gap to 0 and it's effectively pixelate.
Why does my photo look weird with circle tiles? +
Circle tiles leave triangular gaps between them — those gaps fill with the gap color, which dominates if you set a light grout. For circles, pair with a dark grout color so the photo reads through; for squares any grout color works.
How big should tiles be? +
10-20px reads as 'subway tile' or 'mosaic art'. 25-40px reads as 'pixel art' or 'chunky pattern'. Below 8px and you lose the tile feel; above 60px the photo becomes unrecognizable. Match the source resolution — a 4000px photo can take 30px tiles; a 800px photo wants 8-12px.
Why are gaps cut off at the edges? +
If the photo's dimensions don't divide evenly by the tile size, the right and bottom edges get partial tiles. The gap-color background fills those partial spots, but you may see asymmetric trim. Adjust tile size for cleaner edges if it bothers you.
Can I save the tile colors as a palette? +
Not directly here — but the result feeds well into the Color Palette tool. Run the mosaic JPG through the palette extractor at high palette count to get the dominant tile colors as hex codes.
now what?
A few moves after the tiles set
next →
Add Text to Photo
Caption the mosaic in display type.
Open
next →
Shape Crop
Crop the mosaic to a circle or arch.
Open
next →
Drop Shadow
Float the mosaic over paper for a tile-mockup feel.
Open
next →
Pinterest Pin Maker
Use the tiled image as the hero of a Pinterest pin.
Open
next →
Duotone Effect
Recolour the mosaic in two flat tones.
Open
next →
Polaroid Maker
Frame the mosaic in a paper Polaroid.
OpenThe rest of this shelf
Photo Filters
Eight looks plus the original — vintage to cinematic.
Open
Film Grain
Tri-X, Kodak Gold, Lomo — pick a roll, see the grain.
Open
Halftone Effect
Comic dots, risograph red, punk-zine textures.
Open
Pencil Sketch
Photo to graphite drawing in two clicks.
Open
Tilt-Shift Effect
Make real cities look like tabletop dioramas.
Open
Light Leak
Sunset, lomo red, golden hour — bleed light into corners.
OpenBuy tiles, mix grout, lay them.
Real ceramic mosaics use 1cm tesserae set in lime-mortar grout. Roughly $80 in materials for a 30×30cm panel. Slow, satisfying, archival. The digital version is the rehearsal.