Cloud Run Photo Mosaic Generator

This demo generates a photo mosaic from an input image. It uses the Google Cloud Vision API to recognize the image subject, then creates a mosaic from 100 other images of the subject retrieved via a web search.

Here's a photo mosaic of the Orlando Eye.

About this demo

This demo was ported from an Azure Functions demo. The original version used a thin JavaScript client to call functions hosted in Azure. This thin-client pattern is necessary because it is not possible to run a server-side framework on a FaaS platform like Azure Functions.

The Cloud Run version has the following benefits:

• Uses a server-side web framework (ASP.NET). With Cloud Run, there's no need to avoid web frameworks.

• The the entire app can be run locally, without having to install any custom tooling.

• No change to the developer model. Existing applications can be containerized, and run in a serverless manner, without having to re-architect anything. Plus, developers don't have to learn a new functions framework.

Running on Cloud Run

This demo is written in C# using ASP.NET.

To host on Cloud Run, do the following:

1. Get an API key for Bing Image Search. This is needed to perform the image search to retrieve the mosaic tile images.

2. Build a container image from PhotoMosaicService/Dockerfile and upload to Google Container Registry.

3. Create a Cloud Run service from the container image above. Set the environment variable SearchAPIKey to your Bing Image Search API key.