photosquared

photosquared

Description

Small command line utility to generate a square image with a border out of a source image of arbitrary aspect ratio suitable for posting to Instagram.

As an amateur photographer I do all my raw processing in Capture One and want to keep the aspect ratio that makes the most sense for the composition. Unfortunately, Instagram works exclusively with square images. Before I wrote PhotoSquared, I'd have to take the processed image, copy it, make a new all white square image that was 300 pixels wider than the widest side of the source image and insert my processed image. So much work!

Enter PhotoSquared. I built PhotoSquared in an afternoon and there are probably a ton of features I could add to it. For now, it only has the single feature I needed. PhotoSquared is written in Go so you can build it on any machine that supports Go. Now I just process my images as I normally do and before transferring them to my phone I just run them through PhotoSquared and I'm done.

Downloading

All of these instructions assume you are using a Mac because it's what I have. If someone finds this useful and has a Windows machines feel free to contribute some instructions.

• Download Go from https://golang.org/dl/
• Follow the installation instructions for your machine. They may be found here https://golang.org/doc/install
• Get a copy of the PhotoSquared source code here https://github.com/denmark/photosquared and put it in your $GOPATH/src/ directory
• If you have make installed then simply go to $GOPATH/src/photosquared/ and type make
• If you do not have make you can compile PhotoSquared using the following command: go build -o ${GOPATH}/bin/photosquared main.go

Usage

PhotoSquared takes as its only argument the full path to a JPEG, PNG, or GIF file. For example:

$ photosquared DSCF2300.jpg
Reading from: [DSCF2300.jpg]
Input Dimensions: 6000x4000; Output Dimensions: 6600x6600
Writing to: [DSCF2300-squared.jpg]
$

view your output:

$ open DSCF2300-squared.jpg

PhotoSquared should write the output file to the same directory where the input image is.

Customization

There are two parameters embedded in the code that enable you to customize the width of the border and the color of the border.

borderPadding := 300                        // 300 pixels
borderColor := color.RGBA{255, 255, 255, 0} // White

borderPadding is the number of pixels wide the border is. borderColor is the RGB value of the border color.

If you want to adjust either just edit main.go and rebuild PhotoSquared. At some point in the future I might take either one or both of these parameters as command line arguments.

TODO

• Tests
• Windows support
• Try to wrap the built binaries into a Mac or Windows App so they can be run straight from a Capture One process recipe
• Take command line arguments for both borderPadding and borderColor