It turns out that there is already a convert command defined in system32, and when I added ImageMagick to my path in cmder, I added it like this (which was consistent with all of the other path customisations). A simple conversion of all jpgs in the directory to an animated gif. I mean, that’s the exact command that ImageMagick expects. Whenever I find a new command line tool, I like to add it to my Tools/cmder/vendor directory and then customize the init.bat to add that directory (or whatever the appropriate bin directory is) to my PATH when running cmder.Īs is sometimes the case with this sort of “lets just steal the Program Files directory” approach, it didn’t work. I have a Tools directory in my OneDrive that contains cmder and a bunch of tools that I use from the command line (git, python). I grabbed the installed version of ImageMagick, installed it on a Virtual Machine, stole the install directory (god I hate installing development software on my main machine sometimes, it always comes with a bunch of “helpful” stuff, like examples and tutorials and all sorts of other crap that’s better stored on the internet where I could actually search for it) and tossed it into my tools directory.Īs a general rule of thumb, I’m very much in favour of portable applications when command line tools are concerned. To hell with using an online service, I’ll just use this tool to make my gifs myself. It also makes gifs! Fantastic, two birds with one stone. ImageMagick is a sweet little tool for doing command line manipulation of images, including resizing. I was prepared to go through a significant amount of effort to avoid having to do the thing manually in fact. I’m a lazy person however (to potential employers, remember, laziness is one of the great virtues of a programmer) so I didn’t want to have to go through the hundreds of photos I had and manually resize them. Seems fair enough, any image editing program will let you do just that. My first thought was to find a way to resize the images down to an appropriate size and then use one of the online services. The hard bit was the combination of my photos being quite large along with the fact that they didn’t necessarily transition cleanly from one picture to the next (what can I say, taking pictures in exactly the same position from week to week is hard). There are online services that do just that ( makeagif is one for example, but there are others). Its actually really easy to stitch together a bunch of images into an animated gif. I should clarify that statement somewhat I suppose. I mean, the internet is FULL of animated gifs, surely it can’t be that hard. I assumed that stitching together a series of images into an animated gif would be easy. I thought that since I have a blog now, I’d be able to use those photos to show my legions of readers (ha) the changes happening in my garden. It would probably be really interesting though.Īnyway, back to the making animations thing. I’m sure there’s also a whole bunch of complicated things you could do in order to programmatically match up static points of reference (like facial recognition algorithms maybe) but I feel that that sort of thing is a little beyond my grasp at this point in time. The simplest implementation I can think of would be to get the app to overlay the last image taken over the live feed of the camera screen (with a low opacity) so the user could align the static points in the last photo to now and make sure that the photo was taken from the same angle/position. Obviously I don’t have tripods or any other form of static photography setup in my yard (they’d just get in the way) so I have to manually do my best to align the photos to static points of reference, so that you can flip through them quickly to see change.Īs an aside, I’ve thought before of making an app for my phone that would help me do the above. I use my phone to take the photos, which are then automatically synced to OneDrive (which is then in turn synced to my other computers). They act as a form of metric, allowing me to compare two arbitrary points in time, and I use that ability to verify that I’m actually making things better. I’ve been taking weekly photos of various locations around my yard over the past year or so. In my last blog post ( Permaculture Paradise, the road so far…, an instant classic by the way), I mentioned that I found it to be quite an ordeal to create animations to show how my garden changed over time.
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