New Media Initiatives Blog

Party People Photos was back in action at After Hours last week, and I promised more technical details of the new features. The big change this time around was automatic uploading to flickr. After each photo was taken, it was transfered, processed, uploaded and finally displayed on-screen in the lounges. I ended up re-writing all the transfer and processing scripts to work better, and they all functioned without problem.

After a photo was taken, it was saved to a folder on the capture iMac. A script started by launchd watched the folder and transfered the file via rsync to my workstation. The files were transfered to my workstation rather than directly to the display computers for two reasons.

Photoshop
Once the files got to my workstation, another script watched the incoming folder and sent all incoming jpg files to Photoshop. We wanted the process all the images to make sure they looked their best. Cameron, one of our photographers, developed a handy action for the photos that would give them more contrast and punch. The easiest way to automate this in photoshop is to use the script events manager to run an action on every file that is opened ( File > Scripts > Scripts Event Manager… ). The easiest way on OS X to get a particular application to open a file is to use the open command with the -a argument. The -a lets you specify the binary that you want to use to open the file. Otherwise, you’re at the mercy of whatever program has associated itself with jpeg files. Here’s the script:

#! /bin/sh

# this script takes files from the 1_incoming directory and tells photoshop to open them
# should be called by launchd which will be watching the 1_incoming folder
# photoshop should be set to perform the action on open new document

while true; do

myls=`ls /Volumes/Patience/_after_hours/1_incoming/`

	if [ "$myls" != '' ] ; then
		for myFile in /Volumes/Patience/_after_hours/1_incoming/*.JPG
		do
			/usr/bin/open -a /Applications/Adobe\ Photoshop\ CS2/Adobe\ Photoshop\
				CS2.app/Contents/MacOS/Adobe\ Photoshop\ CS2 $myFile
			sleep 2
			mv $myFile /Volumes/Patience/_after_hours/2_incame/  2>&1 > /dev/null
		done
	fi
	sleep 10
	#take care of pesky .DS_Store files, which can pop up from the Finder
	find /Volumes/Patience/_after_hours/ -name .DS_Store -exec rm -f {} \;
done

# added a return on the photoshop open line for clarity in the browser

Every 10 seconds, if there is a new file, and it is a jpeg, it will get sent to Photoshop. Photoshop runs the action, and saves the file to a new folder, again as a jpeg.

I used my workstation for this because it already had Photoshop installed, and I didn’t want to deal with licensing issues on another machine. I created another account that had photoshop set up just right and the launchd jobs start onload. When we set up PPP again for Picasso show, I’d love to be able to do post-processing via imagemagick, since it is command-line, easy to install and unencumbered by licensing issues.

Flickr Uploading
Photoshop has now saved the jpeg to a different folder. This folder is being watched by yet another script, similar to the last. This script does two things: copies the jpegs to our projection machines and uploads them to flickr. The copy process is mostly unchanged, though I used scp instead of rsync, since the I want to copy files one at a time. As with all the rsync or scp transfers, I just made sure I had my keys set up and authorized, and it worked fine.

Uploading to flickr was the trickiest part of the operation, but thankfully flickr provides a great API and there are a lot of libraries that simplify the process. I ended up using phpflickr. I am pretty familiar with php, and phpflickr only requires php4, which is the version of php-cli in OS X. In order to get it working, you have to apply for an API key, giving it write permission. Using your API key and the secret, you generate a token that you can use to upload with (you need all three to upload). Phpflickr provides the scripts necessary to provide the callback URL that flickr needs, even if you’re not uploading things directly from the web. It is somewhat confusing, and I’m not entirely sure I need the callback url, but it works all the same.

With the tokens all set, uploading the photo is as simple as upload, add to group, add to set. To get the ID of the group and the set, I just used the API explorer, which lists the groups and sets I visited. I had to create the set before I started uploading, though it is possible to create a set through the APIs. I also created a function in the upload script that used a word list to generate a title for each photo as it was uploaded to flickr. I am not a fan of seeing photos with names like IMG_4097.JPG, and this solved that and created some fun and funny juxtapositions.

Other notes, future
I enabled printing of all our photos on flickr, so you can now get prints if you want. In the US, flickr and yahoo do the printing through Target, which also happens to be a major sponsor of After Hours. Perhaps that is an opportunity for the future.

I still had some trouble with the camera not acting the way I wanted. Sometimes it would get into a state where it was totally locked, and the only way to reset it was to pull the power by removing the battery adapter; turning it off and on again wouldn’t do it. Due to the way that gphoto2 talks to the 10D, the capture command doesn’t fully finish, so I kill it after a few seconds. I think what was happening was that in some focus situations, the autofocus was taking too long and the camera hadn’t finished capturing when I kill the command. In the future, I am going to experiment with using a manual focus, which will eliminate that problem.

Gphoto2 was also recently updated to 2.3.0, and it now compiles without too much trickery on OS X. However, it hasn’t fixed my problems with capture on the Canon 10D. I might experiment with modifying the Canon class for the 10D a bit to see if I can get it to work.

We also had some problems with the flash not always firing when the camera went. Unfortunately, the flash we’re using doesn’t have an input for a power adapter, so we were running on batteries. It also doesn’t indicate low batteries, leaving us, literally, in the dark. For the Picasso After Hours, we’re planning on jerryrigging a wired power adapter to provide the 6V it requires.

I’ll also be setting up Party People Photos for the Free First Saturday on March 3rd. I think kids will get a kick out of it. We won’t add the photos to the After Hours Group Pool, but we will put them on our Flickr. Watch for it (or attend, it is free).

If you attended the After Hours party for Heart of Darkness, odds are you might have participated in one of the 300-plus photos taken during the night. Another After Hours is happening again tonight, and PPP will be there for all the action.

This time around, the technical setup is more automated and much improved. Photos will be automatically uploaded to flickr during the party. You won’t have to wait for me to come into work the next morning, batch process them, and upload them. I’ll try to post some more technical details on the workflow next week, since it has taken a bit of debugging and might be useful for some to know.

In the meantime, you can find the photos in the Kara Walker After Hours flickr set, and also in the After Hours group pool. If you take any photos at the party with your own camera, add them to the pool!

Wrapping up my three-day digital signage extravaganza are two videos from the MCA Chicago. Their signage is located behind the lobby desk, just inside and to the right of the main entrance.

The four signs are not synchronized or spanned, but the timings are such that it can appear that there are things that line up. Having the signs behind glass and built into the wall gives them a more polished, integrated look. The glare in person is not as bad as it appears in the video.

Also, I have to say, the Stingel show at the MCA is fun. I am a big fan of work that lets visitors touch, interact and leave their mark. The silver walls were quite marked up after only a week, I can only imagine what they’ll be like in a month or two.

In addition to recently visiting MAM, I was also to the Art Institute of Chicago over the previous weekend. Here is a little videographic evidence of that visit.

Signage at the Art Institute of Chicago on Vimeo

This signage isn’t all that exciting. Based on what I saw, the loop is pretty short and it only advertises their audio tours. I really like how the mouse pointer is stuck on the screen in the upper left. At least we know it is running from a mac (the cursor is black). The display is located in an area just to the left of the main entrance of the building, in the coat check and tickets counter room.

As a native of Milwaukee, I visited home over the christmas holiday break. While there, I had the opportunity to stop into the Milwaukee Art Museum, which I always enjoy. In the lobby of the museum, I noted some digital signage which was not there when I last visited over a year ago. Here is a short documentation video:

MAM Signage on Vimeo

They have essentially divided the screen into three sections. The largest displays posters for current exhibits along with a welcome message. The two side areas cycle through images of work in the museum and info about things visitors to the museum might want to know: events for that day, where the bathrooms are, schedule for the Brise Soleil opening, etc. It doesn’t seem particularly groundbreaking, but it is likely quite easy to update, only requiring static images to be changed periodically. It does catch your eye as you come into the museum, since it is directly in front of the main entrance from the parking structure or the street. The shot at left shows slightly more context. The lobby desk is a few yards behind me as I’m taking this picture.

If you’re not familiar, several years ago they added a new addition, designed by Santiago Calatrava, his first building in the US. It has been a huge success for the museum and the city of Milwaukee.

One of the bloggers over at Daily Kos has an interesting analysis of the age old Mac vs. Windows decision, but this time with an eye towards how that may correlate to political leanings:

…the share of the market held by Apple’s OS X operating system looks tiny beside Microsoft’s behemoth. It’s even smaller on conservative web sites. When it comes to visitors to Instapundit, OS X visitors make up only 2-3%, suggesting that conservatives are less likely to go for the Apple brand than the general public. On the other hand, Daily Kos statistics show that between 15% and 25% of visitors to this site are using Macs — an astounding 5x times the general population of these computers. If you were at YearlyKos last time around, you could spot more Macs at breakfast than you’d find in an Apple store.

We see a similar phenomenon here on the Walker site. Roughly a quarter of our visitors are on a Mac, which is quite high compared to the general browsing population. There are a couple likely reasons for this, (all speculation, mind you). There is a booming design culture here in the Twin Cities, and the Walker is a cornerstone of it. Designers use Macs. We have an extensive educational outreach program, and education tends to use the Mac. And we have gallery 9, an online gallery of internet-based art, which appeals to other internet-based artists, who also tend to use the Mac.

What does it mean to us in the end? Not a whole lot. We design all our sites to be platform agnostic, which is what any good web developer should do.