“Books That I Read While Waiting for the 21st Century Library To Open”

Currently on display at the
Downtown Hayward Public Library
888 C Street, Hayward, CA

The style of this piece is called a Photomosaic, which is a mosaic of Hayward's new 21st Century Library composed from a large collection of book cover images. It's composed of 63 x 28 tiles, for a total of 1,764 unique book cover images.

I took the master photo of the library in early August 2019, and generated the mosaic from a collection of a million images that I obtained while visiting the Internet Archive located in San Francisco. The Archive is the largest digital library in the world, with a huge collection of digitized books, videos, audio CDs, and websites archived since the '90s.

While anyone may download software to generate photomosaics, this piece was created from software that I wrote myself, mostly in 2010. The main algorithm is written in C so as to run really fast, while additional code was written in Perl and used ImageMagick for image processing.

In order to create this piece, I had to make a few modifications. First of all my collection of book cover images came in various sizes or aspect ratios, that is the ratio of the width to the height. I filtered the collection to only include those books that fit an approximate 2:3 width to height ratio. The collection of images also had a number of duplicates, which I removed. Overall it took a few tries of over 24 hours for my computer to process the million images prior to generating the final mosaic.

My photomosaic made its debut during the Hayward Sun Gallery's Planet Hayward: Heart of the Bay exhibit on Aug 16 - Oct 5, 2019. It was then purchased and donated to the Hayward Library, which was put up on display as part of their permanent collection in early 2020.

Original Logo

Mosaic (40 x 40 tiles)

Archive building in SF

Mosaic (50 x 33 tiles)

Person, plane nose & water tower

Mosaic (48 x 32 tiles)

Orange Rose

Mosaic (23 x 17 duplicate tiles)