A montage of phones lock screen showing photos of nature

I don’t usually pay a lot of attention to new features when an OS updates nowadays. But the other day I discovered the “photo shuffle” Lock Screen feature on my phone. Now every time I unlock my phone I see another random image. I picked nature as the subject. I am not sure what algorithm is picking the photos but the results are delightful.

Since 2014 I’ve been making “movies” with my flickr photos for the year. I make them with a script which downloads the years photos puts them together into a movie and, use to, add music. The Music bit is broken (https) so I downloaded some manually.

This year pretty much stopped in October, then I got covid in November and have not been out much since.

I also average the photos ( below) and montage them for the featured image. This year I made a version of the script to download wee square images for the montage (average & montage scripts here).

I enjoy both the process and watching my photos flickr by. I like the fact that I can easily tweek bit of the script or run the video creation again quickly to try out different speeds, music etc.

Replied to Kenny Pieper on Twitter (Twitter)
“Book Title Poetry https://t.co/HRchdqOV3Z”

Very cool indeed Kenny, I’ve done spine stories: photo of a pile of books with my class, & I think #ds106

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RFID Machines in British Libraries Are Producing Charming Found Poetry


Which is pretty wonderful and I saw in @katexic newsletter

After seeing @adders on micro.blog posting some timelapse I though I might have another go. My first thought was to just use the feature built into phone. I then though to repurpose a raspberry pi. This lead to the discovery that two of my PIs were at school leaving only one at home with a camera. This we zero had dome sterling service taking over 1 million pictures of the sky and stitching them into 122918 gifs and posting them to tumblr. I decommissioned that when tumblr started mistaking these for unsuitable photos.

My first idea were just write a simple bash script that would take a pic and copy it to my mac. I’ve done that before, just need to timestamp the image names. Then I found RPi-Cam-Web-Interface. This is really cool. It turns your pi into a camera and a webserver where you can control the camera and download the photos.

I am fairly used to setting up a headless pi and getting on my WiFi now. So the next step was just to follow all the instructions from the RPi-Cam-Web-Interface page. The usual fairly incomprehensible stuff in the terminal ensued. All worked fine though.

I then downloaded the folder full of images onto my mac and stitched them together with ffmpeg.

ffmpeg is a really complex beast, I think this worked ok:

make a list of the files with

for f in *.jpg; do echo "file '$f'" >> mylist.txt; done

then stitch them together:

ffmpeg -r 10 -f concat -i mylist.txt -c:v libx264 -pix_fmt yuv420p out.mp4

I messed about quite a bit, resizing the images before starting made for a smaller move and finally I

ffmpeg -i out.mp -vf scale=720:-2 outscaled.mp4

To make an even smaller version.

I am now on the look out for more interesting weather or a good sunset.