discussed ways of:
a) collecting photographic data online, and
b) coding, to visualise/control the collected images.
Online image data collection
WIG
Searches Google under a set criterion and keywords, downloads the images and then saves in a folder. Free version (WIG Light) or €20 for a version with no limits to the amount of images to download. It can also translate search phrase into other languages [WIG, 2010].
Another website introduced to me was Fiveprime and its Flickr Hive Mind. Hive Mind is a "data mining tool" which allows users to sort photographic images from Flickr, that includes searching images with licenses that allow non-commercial and commercial use [Siemers, 2010].
In order to collect recently uploaded images, Autoitscript was used to refresh the Hive Mind page every 5 minutes, with the phrase "berlin wall" in the tag search box and searching under "recent". The new photos, provided they have been some photos uploaded since the previous Autoitscript search, will now be downloaded into a folder.
Image display/presentation
To manipulate/control the presentation of images, we have used Pure Data. This controls:
- how the photos appear and disappear - controlling the image size to first appear small and then enlarge, pause for 2 seconds, and then reduce to nothing again,
- to which positions (there are 3 positions in this prototype window) to display the images in,
- and select a random image from the 50 recent photos that have been downloaded by Autoitscript.
Elements to consider, or to refine, are:
- length of time each image is displayed, and between each photo to appear in one of the windows,
- what the size of the window is to be (for the prototype, it is only large enough to display 3 photos),
- how the images appear and disappear: speed, size, opacity, and quantity of images.
Autoitscript (2010) http://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3/index.shtml [02/08/2010]
IEM [2010] Pure Data. [Online] http://puredata.info/ [02/08/2010]
Siemers, N. [2010] Flickr Hive Mind. [Online] http://fiveprime.org/ [02/08/2010]
WIG [2010] WebImageGrab version 7.5. [Online]
http://www.sas21.de/apps/webimagegrab/ [02/08/2010]
