Do you recognize any of these good looking people?

If you’re a T.V. person, we would like to suggest you tune in to Good Morning America tomorrow morning =)

We get to see tons of creative collages each day, like this one by Erin. Erin was gracious enough to allow us to share her collage with you and even explained how she got the idea!

My brother’s birthday was coming up and I didn’t want to give the
regular store bought gift or gift card. My brother had recently went
on a trip across the U.S. to visit the major national parks. Along the
way, he took pictures of his greatest love: plants! I desperately
wanted to put these pictures into a collage but couldn’t figure out
the best way to do it until I found ScrapWalls. After sneaking several
pictures off my brother’s computer, I put the pictures into the tree
collage and added a verse I found to fit the pictures. I framed it and
gave it to him on his birthday. He loved it and even shared it on
Facebook!

An awesome story, thank you for sharing, Erin!

Exciting News:

One of our most frequent requests is for new or different shapes than the 30 we currently have on the site. Our developers are putting the finishing touches on a back end program that will allow us to churn out new shapes at a much faster rate! If you have an idea for a new shape that you would like to see on Scrapwalls, please e-mail us. Stay in touch with us via Facebook or Twitter to be updated when new shapes are released!

But there is one big change we wanted to share with you: it is now possible to share your collages with friends via Facebook, e-mail or your own blog.

To share your collage, simply click on the new green “SHARE NOW” button below the “ADD TO CART” button.

You’ll be taken to a page where you can generate HTML for a website or post your collage to your Facebook profile.

Of course, after you’re done sharing, you can still order a high-quality poster of your collage!

Good riddance Java uploader!

Earlier this week the ScrapWalls development team implemented a brand new flash-based photo uploader. We are pretty excited about this development and we hope you are too.

The new uploader is faster, and more user-friendly. It works just like the flash uploader that Facebook uses.

Take it for a test drive and let us know what you think.

Sharing – You can now e-mail and share any ScrapWall with the “Send” and “Share” buttons in the upper-right corner of the view page.

Embed – With the “Share” button, you can also get HTML for an iframe version of the current ScrapWall to embed in your blog or website.

Better Image Management – Each time you upload photos, you can select where to add them. ScrapWalls also groups photos by date. When you add more photos to a wall, they are better organized and you can see a preview of each photo.

Future Plans

As with each new launch, the list of things we want to do in the future continues to grow. Here is a sampling of some features we thought you would want. Please leave a comment if you have any other suggestions

• Ordering prints of ScrapWalls
• Resizing images on the edit page by dragging their corners
• Better auto-placement algorithms that have a fixed border between all images
• Auto-placement algorithms that generate ScrapWalls in different shapes
• Importing photos from Flickr and other photo sharing sites
• ScrapWalls Facebook application

Starting today, you can create a collage at TreasureKnit.com by visiting the following URL:

http://treasureknit.com/blankets/collage.aspx

From the collage blanket page, select “go to step 3″ and then “get started” underneath the ScrapWalls heading on the left. This will take you a special ScrapWalls page for easily building a collage blanket.

You can also get a sneak preview of some new ScrapWalls features at the TreasureKnit.com collage builder. The one we are most excited about is drag resizing. Now, instead of having to use the resize dialog, you can simply drag the lower-right corner of any image to resize it like you would a window on your desktop. The TreasureKnit collage builder also includes a faster image uploader and an improved menu system.

Captions

Zoom in and hover over photos to see their captions.  Click on walls or photos for extended information such as location, date taken, and author.  After creating an account and uploading photos, everyone can now add captions from the new captions page, or using the “properites” button while editing a ScrapWall.

One-Click Navigation

Viewing ScrapWalls is now easier than ever with our one-click navigation. Just click anywhere in the view area and the window will pan to your current mouse location!

Auto-Placement

Short on time, but still want to make a collage? The new auto-place feature in the edit page will automatically arrange and resize all of your photos into a grid on your ScrapWall.

Privacy

Everyone has personal pictures. That is why we have added privacy controls to ScrapWalls. When creating a wall, you now have the following options:

Public – Share your wall with the world.

Personal – Share with all of your friends. This wall will not go on the site MetaWall, but will be shown if someone views your main wall (e.g. at http://www.scrapwalls.com/johndoe).

Private – Share with specific friends. Only those who you send a direct link (e.g. at http://www.scrapwalls.com/johndoe/myprivatewall) will see your ScrapWall. It will not be shown on your main wall or the site MetaWall

A Blog!

It looks like you have already figured this one out. Please leave us your feedback about the new features and others you would like to see in the future so we can keep on making ScrapWalls as awesome as possible!

Thanks for taking time to read and we hope you enjoy ScrapWalls Version 2!

Cheers,
Joe, Kevin, and Kyle

What is it?

ScrapWalls lets you build and share photo collages online. You can upload pictures, arrange them with our easy drag-and-drop edit interface, and then publish your wall for others to see. Unlike traditional photo sharing, creating a ScrapWall is fun, you should try it out!

Not a photographer? At ScrapWalls.com, you can peruse collages that have been created by others on the MetaWall. When someone makes a public ScrapWall, we look it over, and, if we like what we see (sorry spammers), add it to the MetaWall. The MetaWall is a large and ever-growing collage of collages. On it, you can quickly browse through thousands of images with our zooming interface, which makes it easy to quickly glance at a collage and view only the best photos.

Meet the Creators

Kevin, Joe, and Kyle are all graduates of the University of Michigan. They got started in ScrapWalls in fall of 2007 while they were living in Seattle. Here is some more about each of the creators:

Kevin Borders – Kevin is a Ph. D. student in computer science at the University of Michigan.

Outside of work, photography is one of his passions. Kevin got involved with ScrapWalls (in fact, created the first ScrapWall) while trying to make an original anniversary gift for his girlfriend. With about 1000 high-resoution photos, Kevin arranged them into an outline of him and Jennifer.

Joe Golden – Joe is an Economics PhD student at the University of Michigan. After completing undergrad at at the University of Michigan, Joe worked at Microsoft for two years. His first foray into innovative web development was hungryhungrycoeds.com, an online database of campus events with free food.

Kyle Mulka – Kyle started working at Amazon after he graduated from UM in 2007. Kyle has been involved with a number of other websites and projects, including mschedule.com and the gmap uploader. The gmap uploader creates map tiles out of an image, and it led to his involvement with ScrapWalls. As the story goes, Kevin came home from work one day (Kyle and Kevin were roommates) asked Kyle, “How BIG of an image can gmap uploader handle?” The answer ended up being about 8000 pixels square, but over the next few weeks Kyle and Kevin worked to create the first ScrapWall (pictured above), which came in at 50,400 x 38,000 pixels – a pretty big collage!