The dynamic photo you see here of my sleeping dog was shot with my DSLR and automatically uploaded to Flickr with only the press of the shutter button. He wasn't that impressed, either.
Last week I said I wanted to make some sort of practical—if dead end—advance this week and the good news is I've done so; the bad news is that it doesn't quite work as elegantly as I'd hoped.
As you probably don't recall, my goal this week was to build the "World's Largest Cameraphone," a wearable system that would allow me to snap shots with my Canon DSLR and have them automatically upload to Flickr. As I'm not much of a scripter, let alone programmer, I was delighted to find Ordinal Malaprop's Upload to Flickr Folder Action, which, once attached to a Mac OS X folder, will convert to JPEG and upload to Flickr via email any image file that is dropped into the directory of your choice. I removed the JPEG conversion step from the Applescript since my images were already being saved in JPEG, but it's nice that the script is already set up for that step, as even a dilettante like me could easily add in more "Image Event" actions to resize, crop, or convert my images—important when on slow internet uplinks, as even the smallest JPEG files from my camera are still around 400KB.
(A previous system I had almost completed to do this sort of upload with Automator sadly no longer works, as the Automator Action I had used does not work on Intel Macs, and I'm not wise nor patient enough to learn how to parse Flickr's API to build one myself.)
So the process, in whole, goes like this:
Continue reading "Gargoyle: I've Built an 8 Megapixel Luggable Cameraphone" »
