>>6211388>>6211396I've found that, if you're looking to make these photo-realistic pixelated pictures, the easiest way it to posterize the photo to a limited amount of colors and then do a mosaic filter based on an even-number square that's roundly divisible by both the height and width dimensions of the picture.
You could probably play around with layers and the order in which you apply these adjusments/filters for different results; here's a fast one I did to demonstrate.