I came across an unopened, 1000 piece Elvis puzzle at a garage sale, and I couldn’t pass it up. It’s black and white, and each piece of the puzzle contains about four tiny, gorgeous pictures of Elvis. So far I have done the borders and separated the pieces out into white, grey, black, and where two colors meet. I am completely lost as to how to work on this puzzle. Here is a picture of the box for reference. http://eil.com/images/main/Elvis+Presley+-+Photomosaic+Jigsaw+Puzzle+-+TOY-377689.jpg
I’d do the border, then the word ELVIS, then get the all black pieces for his hair and clothes. Beyond that I think it’s just going to be brute force.
I’d start with the border, then the word, then the microphone stand and cord which make nice, relatively-sharp vertical lines. Then, I’d do anyplace else where colors meet.
One advantage to it being a photomosaic: I assume that all the small pictures are right-side-up (you can verify this from putting the edge together)? That means that you know the orientation of all of the pieces. It looks from the inset that they’re all standard shape (alternating innies and outies): You can separate out all of the pieces into horizontal ones and vertical ones. Now you know that horizontal pieces all connect to vertical ones and vice-versa, and you only need to check four potential connections to see if two pieces go together, instead of eight. That’s a factor of four reduction in the work needed.
There are other techniques useful for nonstandard piece shapes, but we’ll leave those off unless it turns out that the inset was misleading and the puzzle does have some of them.
My wife and I have done quite a few Photomosaic puzzles in the past. There’s really no other way than how Joey P has recommended. It’ll be a log slow slog through the thing.