A late night programming exercise – I wanted to play with Flickr’s API and the newly arrived, at the time, bitmap data object in Actionscript 2.
This tool lets you crop images and adjust some of the visual aspects of photos (saturation, hue, brightness etc…) from flickr without having to save them or use anything other than your web browser. It uses Kevin Luck’s wonderfully timesaving Flickr API wrapper Flashr and partially implements Mario Klingemann’s colormatrix.
An aspect of Flickr I really like is the constructive comments on photographs – how an image might look better framed differently or that it might make more of a statement if it was in black and white. Any help with composition and taking photos in general is much appreciated. This was really a simple way of learning more about some aspects of photography (and Actionscript) by allowing me to quickly implement these suggestions or to simply browse Flickr and have a play with saturation, contrast and frame. I created it a while before picnik was available.
It was never meant for public eyes but a few friends wanted me to post it up so they could use it. The code is a glorious mess hence I’m not offering the source. However, it’s not obfuscated. There are a few peculiarities/bugs but as it was just a bit of experimental fun so they’ll be staying put for the time being – it’s provided ‘as is’ and there isn’t a save feature. If you find it just a tiny bit useful that’s great – enjoy.
I’ve written out some instructions below but it should be fairly intuitive.
Try it HERE
The two main ways I use it: either find the PhotoID of the particular image I want to play with or do a general tag/keyword search and have a general tweak of random photos. The Photo ID can be found by looking at the URL of the Flickr page for that photo. Once obtained, enter the ID, press the orange ‘PHOTO ID’ button and once the image has loaded press the ‘Select’ Button.
To carry out a general search with keywords just type in your keywords separated by a space then hit the TAG button. You can also search using the Flickr user name, email (if that user’s settings allow), or their NSID.
After clicking the appropriate button it both carries out a search and brings up a selection of the first 30 images it finds or displays the specific image you’ve entered. Click the Select button to continue and tweak the photo – other buttons allow you to view the photo on Flickr or carry out new searches.
If you viewed thumbnails, the grey tab at the bottom of the screen can be dragged up showing the thumbs again and allowing selection of a new image.
Once you’ve selected the image you want, the main part of the tool is fairly obvious – sliders to make some simple adjustments and by clicking and dragging the corners of the image you can crop.
Photos from sites other than Flick can also be used. The ‘Get URL’ button allows you to load in images from other sites using the url of the image. Try entering “http://www.danielsteel.co.uk/images/3.jpg” (without quotations) and clicking the Get URL button.