As i have never worked with images before i thought i give it a try and make some image Mosaic creator... Just brightness, not in color this time...

What i came up with until now is, filling the sketch with tiles and taking the brightness out of the source image and recreate it with recangles...
Now I have to bring these two things together...
Actually i think i know what i have to do right now, but i just dont know how.
i guess i have to read through all my images at first and get the average brightness and save it somehow so that i can easily choose the right image corresponding to the "gray" value, i use right now to fill the rect.

How would i do that, and doesnt it take very longt? Im planning to use about 2500 tiles... Wouldnt it be better to precalculate the brightness rename the images like : no1_value256.gif and so one?

Just dont know how to go on at this point. Would be thankful for some hints and help.

You can download it with some tiles here:

http://www.dec32.de/public/mosaic.zip

And here is the Source
--------------------------------------------

Cube[] cube = new Cube[100000];

int tileCount = 6; //tiles in data folder

PImage[] tile = new PImage[tileCount];
float[] tileValue= new float[tileCount];


PImage seed;

int colCount;
int rowCount;
int cubeCount = 0;

void setup(){
 size( 500, 500 );
 frameRate( 24 );
 smooth();
 background(255);
 noLoop();
 noStroke();

 seed = loadImage("20x20.gif"); // image to resemble


   colCount=  seed.width;
 rowCount= seed.height;

 //loading tiles
 for ( int i = 0; i< tile.length; i++ ){
   tile[i] = loadImage( i + ".gif" );  
 }


 for(int i = 0; i < rowCount;i++){
   for(int j = 0; j < colCount;j++){

     cube[cubeCount] = new Cube(i*width/colCount,j*width/rowCount,width/colCount,height/rowCount,brightness
(seed.get(int(i),int(j))));
     cubeCount+=1;
   }
 }

}  

void draw(){
 background(255);
 for(int i = 0; i< rowCount*colCount; i++){
   cube[i].display();
 }
}

class Cube{
 float x;
 float y;
 float w;
 float h;

 float gray;


 Cube(float _x, float _y, float _h, float _w, float _gray)  {
   x = _x;
   y = _y;
   w = _w;
   h = _h;
   gray = _gray;

 }

 void display()  {

   //just for testing
   fill(gray,100);
   rect(x,y,w,h);


  // image(tile[int(random(tileCount))],x,y,w,h);

 }
}

Thanks again Philho, that really helped me. I knew i had to do it in 2 steps somehow and save the results... saving it in a text file is the right approach...