While trying to put together a collage yesterday showing an amusing sequence of shots of a silvereye swallowing a ball of fruit it had yanked from a nearby fruit from the Autumn Birdy Berry Tree, I was reminded yet again just how frustrating this process is, with practically none of the tools out there really letting me do what I need + want (or at least none of the ones I currently have access to). Sure, I could ultimately bolt this together using some scripts / command-line tools, but it's a bit of a pain iterating on visual stuff like this that way.
My Requirements / Process-To-Automate:
* 1) Arrange my chosen images in a line, side-by-side (with ability to reorder them, add/remove items in this lineup, preview different combinations, etc. to get the flow of images right)
NOTE: You can somewhat do this with existing tools, but it's always *a pain* to do (and in some, it requires starting over / creating multiple draft solutions)
* 2) Allow bulk cropping the width of these to just an interesting section
NOTE: This requires ability to interactively preview + see the effects of such cropping, to make the iteration process fast + painless. This practically rules out all the command-line / scripted approaches. Also, no simple collage maker tools come close to even considering this possibility.
* 3) Allow ability to adjust vertical alignment on each of these individually (to fix framing differences) then v-crop any messy / scraggly bits on either side due to image sizing differences
NOTE: Same story as above with #2
* 4) Make the canvas fit the whole strip of images (i.e. typically a very wide but not very tall image), at the highest resolution possible (from which I can then compress / resize as needed to satisfy upload constrants)
NOTES:
i) This last step in particular *always* manages to stump most tools out there. I get it - those are all optimised for the Insta / FB / etc. folks who have fixed "square" templates to fit their shit into. But, I don't particularly care about that when doing this.
ii) This is actually a major gripe I have with most of our "creative" digital tools too - from painting apps to music scoring systems: i.e. The need to know and specify up front a "box" that will be big enough to fit whatever you're trying to do into (and if not, to then continuously grapple with various resizing + re-fitting tools to get more space to work in). In that sense, that's one of the things I'm particularly proud of with Grease Pencil - that it provides an infinite canvas, free from these constraints (and is why I use/used it as my drawing tool) :)
Hence, I finally decided to bite the bullet, and see if I could hack together a solution for this.
Cue a few fun hours on Saturday night dragging boxes around in a diagramming tool
(* and once again cursing the need for a fixed, predefined canvas size up-front all through this process... some day I *will* have to rectify that problem too, but maybe after tackling this one and fully generalising the app framework over a few more projects like this first)
Anyway, back to today's story: After last night's session, I now have the following rough design for the data layout for an app to solve this problem.
Basically, if I hack up all the corresponding parameter + struct definitions using my "Parus" UI/App framework, hack up the basic layout engine / image generation engine (async + background worker process pool processing), and wire up a basic front-end, I should have enough of a basic design plan here to pretty awesome tool that blows everything else out of the water.
The only question is: Do I have enough time + energy to pull this off right now (considering my other projects in the pipeline + work commitments + newfound understand of the importance of getting sufficient rest/downtime) 😜
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