Let’s take pictures!

This wednesday our local louvain-la-neuve LUG (louvain-li-nux) will participate to a student fair showcasing all activity groups present in the university. We had the idea of creating a photo booth stand where people can stop by take a picture by pressing a button and then send that picture on a dynamic website or on a big projector live. All this using free software of course. It’s a good way to engage conversation with people!

I searched the internet for something existing but unfortunately couldn’t find anything except this little snippet of code for the Nokia 880 device. I took the code, embraced and extended it resulting in:

ScreenshotPhotobooth Screenshot

Basically it uses gstreamer to grab frames from the webcam then it feeds a double pipeline, one displaying the image on screen on the gtk widget, and the other allowing to take a buffer when the user clicks the button and encode it to whatever image format is needed.

There is of course the little countdown from 3 to ‘Smile’ when clicking the button, and i plan to add the white screen thingy when the shot is made.. I think apple can sue me right away

The code will be released next week after the application has been proved in the field to be stable enough 🙂


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22 responses to “Let’s take pictures!”

  1. Ploum Avatar

    If only it could work with my cam…

  2. Raphaël Slinckx Avatar

    If your cam works with gstreamer, it should work with it 😉 It’s the basic principle of gstreamer

  3. Andreas Nilsson Avatar

    Wohooooo!
    Massive.

  4. Jakub Steiner Avatar

    I don’t think the ‘record’ icon is appropriate or necessary. I suggest dropping the icon for the button.

    Some app name suggestions:

    PhotoBox
    Blink
    RedEye
    Cheese

  5. Jones Lee Avatar
    Jones Lee

    Yay! Cheessy! Too bad my Sony Vaio FE MotionEye doesn’t work with Linux. I just hate it when Linux lacks lots of driver ;(

  6. Marco Barisione Avatar

    I was going to write a Photobooth clone!

    For the thumbnails of the images I planned to use EogThumbView from eog-ng branch.

    Do you have disortion effects in you program? They can be achieved using OpenGL and shaders.

  7. Raphaël Slinckx Avatar

    Well effects are provided by effectv gstreamer plugins. I suppose you could rite your own gstreamer plugin to do some more effects..

    For the thumbnails i just use an IconView with a large number of columns, it seems to work quite well..

    I like ‘Cheese’ very much 🙂

  8. Swatje Avatar
    Swatje

    I was thinking to do a simular thing for the dipro fairs with ubuntu-be.org
    Because I would use my N800 I had also the idea to let people sign they pictures 😀
    Just an idea!
    I’m willing to help you out if you want, it would be sooo cool!
    Greetz,
    François

  9. Marius Gedminas Avatar

    Cool app!

    BTW, s/Nokia 880/Nokia N800/

  10. nacho Avatar
    nacho

    Cool, nice Photobooth clone.

    It would be really cool a flash effect when taking a photo like Apple’s Photobooth does. I believe this can be done if a composite manager is present.

  11. Jon Avatar
    Jon

    This looks pretty good, I think the record button needs to be changed a little tho. Because it uses gstreamer, it shouldnt be too hard to be able to record video as well right? Although sound would probably be another issue….

  12. Jason Avatar
    Jason

    here is another one gstreamer based but done in python
    http://adam.uwcs.co.uk/kaapow/

    It would be great to have one of these included by default with Gnome.

  13. MaX Avatar
    MaX

    It is really a sad thing, that gstreamer doesn’t support v4l. I use my photo camera as webcam, connected via my TV-Card to the PC.

  14. Antoine Avatar

    [quote comment=”11102″]gstreamer doesn’t support v4l[/quote]
    It’s in SoC…

  15. las Avatar
    las

    Seriously, stop copying Apple. Where the hell is the innovation in GNOME? So many things are outright ripoffs of Os X.

    Its sad. Nautilus, the open save dialog, the control center, this.

    Its just pathetic..

  16. James Laver Avatar

    [quote comment=”11117″]Seriously, stop copying Apple. Where the hell is the innovation in GNOME? So many things are outright ripoffs of Os X.

    Its sad. Nautilus, the open save dialog, the control center, this.

    Its just pathetic..[/quote]

    What about when apple stop copying us?

    Apple are just getting around to implementing ‘spaces’, if you’ve ever used linux you’ll see that in any window manager overlaying X11. Apple introduced time machine, the same effect has been achieved by many linux users by archiving their documents in CVS.

    What exactly are apple doing if not innovating? Oh, that’s right, putting a pretty GUI on top of it. And you say we’re idea thieving?…………….

  17. lars Avatar
    lars

    where is the code? i would like to try (and extend if neccesary) the app.

  18. Libe Avatar
    Libe

    Hi kikidonk,

    I wrote a tutorial about doing some Photobooth effects using GLSL shaders, maybe it’ll suit your needs.Check it out: http://dem.ocracy.org/libero/photobooth/

    Libe

  19. mike Avatar
    mike

    > where is the code? i would like to try
    me too.

    Is this now A GSoC project?
    (see here http://live.gnome.org/SummerOfCode2007/Ideas#head-1be683396714290dae43af13c55a15d60cafcb16)

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  21. mouhamed Avatar

    ola soy mouhamed