National Geographic Infinite Photograph: Sapping Crave's productivity

National Geographic's new Infinite Photograph feature takes over 300,000 photos collected from its archives and submitted by users, and turns them into a giant photo mosaic. It lets you zoom in infinitely, making your way deeper into each photo as it breaks down into smaller photos of various colours.

The service is the latest effort to promote the company's My Shot programme, which showcases user-uploaded photographs both online and in the monthly publication.

Early on Thursday, we spoke with Rob Covey, National Geographic's senior vice president of content and design, about the project. He said it's the beginning of something much larger. "This is version 1.0 of it. We've got a lot more work to do," he said. Covey said that, while this iteration is focused on a general selection of photos of Earth, future versions will break down into areas like water, trees and animals.

Before it hits that point, however, Covey said there's some tweaking to be done in the back end, which was written entirely in-house by one developer. As of now, the application takes about a minute and a half to load in your browser -- maybe too long for some to wait. Future iterations will display higher-quality pictures, and stream in faster.

National Geographic is using the same editorial vetting procedure for user-submitted photos as it does for its magazine, which means all of the shots you see are gorgeous. It's also harder to get your shot in, since it goes through a strict editorial review process. Covey said that there have been some 50,000 user-submitted images that have been contributed, and that the more they get into the system, the more advanced the application can get with its colour sampling.

For those who want to get a similar experience with their own photos there's the Image Mosaic Generator, which will create a mosaic out of uploaded photos using shots from Flickr. But it doesn't let you zoom in to see the full quality version of each shot, or have a neat Flash-based browser like National Geographic does.