Create a big wall paper or poster from your point-an-shoot camera photos for cheap

You probably have a point-and-shoot compact digital camera that can take pictures of upto 12MP resolution, like I do and you want to print a big poster without spending a lot of money, like I do, then I suggest the trick is ‘divide and rule’!

1. Open the picture in GIMP portable.
2. Resize the CANVAS (and not image, as you may distort it to end up making it look ugly!) (with resize all layers option) it to match a 4X6 pattern i.e. Crop (or expand with white space around as needed like piller effect in videos) so that it is a ratio of 4X6. (This is a suggestion only, and with further geometric calculations you may comeup with better sizes)
3. Insert guides (click and drag one of the rulers to create horizontal and vertical guides) at distances that will create a grid for the Guillotine. E.g. for a picture of 400 X 600 size you may create three vertical guides at 100, 200, 300 and five horizontal guides at 100, 200, 300, 400, 500 pixels (you can drag to exact location in zoomed-in picture and keep an eye on statusbar to position perfectly on dot pixels!) to create a grid of 24 sections.
4. Use Image > Transform > Guillotine to break apart the image into several (24 in above example) new files that have been given names. Tedious though, but here I could not find a way to save and close all so you have to save and close all of them individually (Window 7 allows to click on taskbar item of GIMP and select close all windows, causing a series of prompts to save the files, all you do is repeat Alt+S to select save for all files)
5. Usually this creates sections as separate files well named based on the original file name as siblings of the original file in the same folder.
6. You may want to move them to a new subfolder ‘Poster’ and copy to USB and goto your nearest print shop to print them for cheap (I use OfficeWorks.com.au print services where on Kodak machines, they print each 6X4 for just 10cents these days, I think HarveyNorman.com.au also do at similar rate – in fact I have been told that they keep the prices in ‘sync’ due to competition). If you select print all under that folder, your life is usually made easy by printing the files stacked in filename order which is handly later when you want to stick them together or past on wall!

This quick walk through is for my own reference as I spent half an hour to find out again how I did that last time! Feel free to comment to know more about this method or please do share your modifications and suggestions in comments.

Enjoy!