Thanks for telling me about the dead link. It was to a montage (rectangular array) of Polaroids. The montage area was re-vamped, and that directory deleted, especially as the images were of copyright paintings.
Look at..
http://imagemagick.org/Usage/montage/#polaroid
Or the index of the IM examples 'photo_store'
http://imagemagick.org/Usage/photo_store/INDEX.html
if you want to know more.
However The basic idea is to make the Polaroids, say using
+polaroid (which randomizes the rotation angle), then give them each a randomized position that starts with a large radius from some point and gets smaller.
You will need a script to do that! Though a simple example published on this topic could be helpful.
Anyone up to the challenge? Hint look at the randomized rotates in Thumbnails, Polaroid Stack...
http://imagemagick.org/Usage/thumbnails/#polaroid
You can then use one of the flatten methods to overlay them into one final image
-flatten -mosaic and in the next point release of IM
-layers merge.
That last removes any bounds caused by the offset 'origin' that the other two suffers from, either adding extra space to the left and top of the final image, or clipping images that have negative offsets. This operator was added for easier pamarama photo overlay example, but also takes care of the existing problems of using
-shadow layer images caused by
-mosaic negative offset clipping.
hopefully in the next few days the examples at
http://imagemagick.org/Usage/layers/#merge will make things clear.
