mirror of
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49 lines
2.3 KiB
HTML
49 lines
2.3 KiB
HTML
Ever since this version of my site went live I've been meaning to
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post about the generation of the monochrome thumbnails on the [front page](/).
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When I was building the site I wanted to include recent items
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from my Flickr photostream. However with the predominantly monochrome
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design I didn't like the look of all the colour they added. So I looked into
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having monochrome versions of the thumbnails shown.
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The first thing I investigated was Javascript image processing libraries. The
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only main contender in that space was [Pixastic]. It worked but its cross browser
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support wasn't great at the time. So I moved on to writing a tool that I
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could run locally.
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[Pixastic]: http://pixastic.com/
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I decided the tool should generate a single image with
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both the colour and monochrome versions in it (a technique known as spriting).
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Using a single image means only one HTTP request instead of forty. Being a
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programmer with an interest in Cocoa programming I created a small command line
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tool that used the Flickr API to get the details of the last twenty images in
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my photostream, fetch them and then use Core Image to convert them to
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monochrome, add both the colour and monochrome versions to the output image and
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finally save the result.
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This worked great, however when I stopped hosting my site on my Mac I thought I
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would need to run the process periodically on my Linux server, which ruled out
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Core Image. I took this as another opportunity to learn something new and
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rewrote it in Lua using imlib2 bindings. I had to make some additions to the
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imlib bindings, which are [published on GitHub][luaimlib].
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[luaimlib]: https://github.com/wezm/lua-imlib2
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I used the Lua version for some time but never bothered to set it up
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on the server. I wasn't uploading photos all that frequently and it
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was simple enough to run locally and rsync the result. I've recently
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switched back to the Mac version as it was simpler to get up and running
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on my new laptop.
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The [code is on GitHub][code] if anyone wants to do something similar. The
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Cocoa version is on the master branch, the Lua version is on the
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[lua branch].
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[code]: https://github.com/wezm/monothumb
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[lua-branch]: https://github.com/wezm/monothumb/lua
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The current version of the processed thumbnails is shown below.
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<div style="overflow-x: auto;">
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<img src="/images/photos.jpg" />
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</div>
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