PMWall Advanced Engine and Printing Settings

Updated Today · 3 min readAdvanced

Two PMWall template tabs hold settings you configure once and rarely revisit. Both are authored in Foto Master Cloud and travel with the event, so a replacement event computer picks them up automatically on sync.

The defaults are tuned for typical events. Change them only with a specific reason.

Advanced Engine

File Ingestion

Allowed extensions -- Which image file types PMWall accepts from the event's raw folder. Default .jpg, .jpeg, .png, .bmp.

Entries must be dot-prefixed, such as .jpg. Widen this only if a photo source produces a format not in the default list; narrowing it is a way to ignore unwanted files that share the folder.

Advanced Matching

Best-fit queue order -- On by default. PMWall matches pending photos across all remaining empty cells to find the best overall arrangement while the wall fills. Turning it off restores strict first-in, first-out placement.

Leave it on for image quality. Turn it off only when you need each guest's photo to appear in strict arrival order -- for instance when an operator is announcing placements live.
Similarity threshold (pHash) -- Default 10. How visually similar two photos must be before PMWall treats them as near-duplicates. Higher values catch more photos as duplicates.
Color similarity threshold -- Default 5. The colour-difference threshold for treating nearby tiles as duplicates.

These two thresholds decide what counts as a duplicate. How strongly duplicates are then penalised is the Variety slider on the Tile Matching tab, which is the control to reach for first.

Raise the thresholds when guests submit many near-identical photos -- a step-and-repeat backdrop, or a single group photographed repeatedly -- and the wall looks repetitive. Lower them if genuinely different photos are being wrongly suppressed.

Tip: Adjust Variety on the Tile Matching tab before touching these thresholds. Variety changes the penalty and is safe to tune by eye; these thresholds change detection itself and can have surprising effects across the whole wall.

What Is Not Exposed Here

PMWall has further engine internals -- preview performance, AI analysis toggles, watcher timing, and search tuning -- that are deliberately not surfaced in the template. They are device-level or engine-level concerns that either run automatically with a safe fallback or would conflict with settings you already control, such as Crop mode. The device's own values are used for anything the template does not specify.

The device models folder, moderation, and debug artifacts are configured in the app under Settings > Runtime, not here. See PMWall Settings Guide.

Printing

The Printing tab controls the wall-position label printed on each tile, so staff know which cell it belongs to.

Print the C/R position label -- On by default.
Position -- Bottom right (the legacy default), bottom left, top right, or top left.
Text color -- Default black.
Outline color -- Default white, drawn as a halo around the characters.
Label size -- Percentage of the label's shorter edge. Default 5%, range 1-30.

The label is applied to the printed output only. The saved tile image is never modified, so the wall preview and the high-resolution export stay clean.

Keep the outline contrasting with the text. Guest photos vary enormously, and without the halo a black label vanishes against a dark photo.

For printer hardware, output modes, and throughput planning, see Printing PMWall Mosaic Tiles and Labels.

When Changes Take Effect

Advanced Engine settings are read when the mosaic starts. Sync, then start.
Printing settings are re-read on every print pass, so a label change takes effect immediately, even mid-event.