Tyler Uebele

I like to take a lot of pictures. Sometimes, when I see a particularly appealing scene, I will take several overlapped pictures with the intent of putting them together into one panoramic image. In the past, I've tried to use Adobe Photoshop CS2 (or other made-for-the-job tools) to assemble my panoramas. My success was... limited:

Notice how you can see every seam?

More recently, I discovered Microsoft Image Composite Editor which Microsoft offers for free. It's not officially supported, and not a complete product; it has few options for the user to manage, meaning that there is no way to correct what it does wrong. That said, it's by far (by far) the best panoramic image compositor I have seen (not that I have seen many). The single most important aspect of its method is, I think, the perspective correction it does on each frame before trying to combine them. Consider the below rendition of the above panorama:

Or this demonstration of a full 180 degree pan, in which I turned the camera on its side to get more vertical coverage:

I have plenty of other stitched panoramas for your viewing pleasure!

Quite some time ago a co-worker experienced a computer failure. She did not have a backup. She scoured her digital world for any trace of her data. Some of her music was on her iDevice, and while Apple doesn't like to let you copy music off their branded devices, various third parties provide the tools she used to make it happen. Then there was the several hundred photos she had posted on facebook, either in albums, or merely tagged of her. Because facebook scales down uploaded photos, it makes a lousy photo backup site, but when compared to total loss; her choice was evident.

But how to recover several hundred photos from facebook without spending days right-clicking? Ask meyour programming co-worker, of course!

Faced with the challenge of manipulating facebook's album pages to download all of her pictures, I turned to Firefox's Greasemonkey plug-in. Greasemonkey lets users run user scripts, which are basically scripts, run by the user, to various web-pages. In this case, facebook's album pages. Making extensive use of firebug and some basic javascript skills, I was able to coax firefox into downloading an entire album. Running this user script against each of her album pages produced all of her pictures for her.