what's the point?

blue, white, flying

I've had this picture sitting around since I went to NJ in June. I was using it today to test an app I was mucking around with as an excuse to play with the flickr API. The more I looked at the photo the more it grew on me. It just screams indie rock album cover.

The app I was toying with building was going to try and automatically generate photo mosaics given a source image by breaking it down into small squares, calculating the average color of that square and then searching flickr for photos tagged with a given color. Of course it would probably only work for images with a few basic colors. Most people don't tag their images at flickr with things like burntsienna and perrywinkle, for most of the colors in the spectrum (I'm talking roy g biv here) there are a few hundred images to choose from though. I got sidetracked while working on calculating the average color though and spent most of my time using delegates from the worker thread to update the UI, so now I have an app that can, um, calculate the average color of a photo!

I actually found someone who had worked on a similar app to generate mosaics of a video by using frames from other videos as the tiles. After reading over his work it became clear that I'd have to do more than just calculate the average color of a tile, which also made it clear that I'd likely never get the app really working. On the bright side I finally set up a flickr account. It seems like really nice technology, and pretty close to the cutting edge as far as features go (I love services that provide an API).

Posted by joshua at September 2, 2004 08:19 PM