

Show HN: PhotosCovered – Turn Facebook Photos into Composite Cover Photo - gigabet
http://www.photoscovered.com

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gigabet
I’ll start off by saying I realize hackernews isn’t a great target market for
a facebook application. This was a weekend project idea I wanted to play
around with for awhile now, so I’m mostly just showing hn for general
commentary.

So I wanted to build a facebook application that took all your friends profile
pictures and built a composite image out of them the size of the facebook
cover photo...so a montage of all your friends for your cover photo. Turns
out, facebook removed the friends list endpoint from their api a couple months
ago.

So I opted instead to allow users to select their photo albums and then build
a composite image out of the photos in those albums. The user can also overlay
custom text onto the their new cover photo.

A few random notes:

\- The interesting part of this was getting the image sizes, rows and columns
laid out correctly for any possible number of images. I’m sure there are
elegant ways to do this that I didn’t think of, but I was pretty happy with my
solution and how it turned out.

\- The php GD image processing library was very useful, but appears pretty
slow when processing a lot of images. Again, I’m sure there are more efficient
ways to do this (like, not using PHP perhaps), but this does the job and made
overlaying text very simple. I’m not sure how well the server will hold up to
multiple or many users using it at the same time, however.

All in all, a fun exercise. I’ll likely be tossing the source up on github
soon.

