QuirkeyBlogEst. 2005

After a mere 48 hours, Rails rumble and the app we (@mrb_bk and I) set out to build, Please Tag Your Photos is launched.

This was both of our first ‘rumble and I was really excited to participate after 2 years of sitting on the side-lines. Somehow, with not enough planning and really only about 24 hours of coding we were able to get something functional up.

What is Please Tag Your Photos? Well, a while ago I realized that I had over 1000 photos on Flickr and half of them didn’t even have real titles. Sure, I remember the moments the photos have captured now, but what about 5 years from now? I tried to do the tagging and updating in Flickr, but unfortunately, the interface made it really difficult to breeze through a lot of photos. The idea was to make an interface that would guide you and encourage you to give your photos a proper dose of data. We got pretty far in our idea, but given the time and opportunity to work on it some more in the future, I think it could actually be really useful.

What works now:

• Flickr authentication
• Some fancy background fetching and scoring of all your photos
• Updating the title, description, and tags of a photo (updates to flickr too)
• Simple ‘recent tags’ interface
• Live score updates

What we wanted to work:

• Geo-tagging interface
• Some nice flashy JS page loading to make it a single page app (Sammy, duh)

What we knew we knew we werent going to get to this weekend but would like to play with at some point:

• Image scanning (using OpenCV) to do facial recognition/tagging.
• Collaborative Photo tagging – earn ‘points’ for suggesting tags for other peoples photos

All in all, decently successful. We used MongoDB for this project and it boosted productivity in some places (not worrying about changing schemas) and was a big road block in others (getting it to work with DelayedJob). Either way it was cool to get to know it, I’ll definitely be using it for future projects. Somehow, in this exhaustive weekend of coding, I did manage to pack in: Curry Making, Two brunches, a BBQ, and some decent sleep. Not too shabby.

Posted August 24th, 2009 in Development, Geekery, Rails, Ruby
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