Have you ever looked with wonder at those cool photo mosaics, digital pictures that are made up of hundreds of smaller images? With Easy Mosaic, you can create your very own.

Just load up the program, click New, and follow the instructions to quickly create a mosaic with one of your own digital photos or a sample image, using the provided images. You can load up your own photp files to create the mosaic, but the program is substantially slower when working with imported images.

Importing your own images for the mosaic is a bit tricky, but the comprehensive Help document walks you through the process. The default settings create attractive mosaics, but the Help file tells you how to tweak them to suit your style--and even edit specific cells.

You can print directly from Easy Mosaic, or save your creations as JPEG or bitmap files to send to friends.

Easy Mosaic works as advertised, and its interface is well designed, but it costs $35 to license and is not optimized for Windows Vista. A less-polished option for both XP and Vista users is the free AndreaMosaic.

That said, Easy Mosaic does create pretty mosaics. People who enjoy playing with their digital pics can take this 20-day shareware version for a test run and decide whether it's worth paying for.

--Kim Saccio-Kent