Hacking Photo Booth

Update: Tristan O’Tierney discovered this lazyweb requested and created a PhotoBooth add-on called FlickrBooth! It’s free and works like a charm! Check it out!

Photobooth @ Apple Store Palo StoreI suck at coding, so I’m just going to seed this idea and hope someone does the hardwork for me and releases the results.

I stopped by the Palo Alto Apple Store today on my way back from lunch and had my first Photo Booth experience. Wow. What a cool piece of software…!

Talkin’ to Matt, I had an idea: create an Applescript to upload the shots it takes to either a WordPress blog or to the Flickr group tagged with “” automagically. This should be fairly easy, since each photo is stored in /~Pictures/Photo Booth/Photo [#].jpg. You could simply hook up the Flickr Uploadr or 1001 as the upload tool… and maybe toss in a little Automator action to make it all happen in the background. Then you could aggregate the results (hmm, with Suprglu or Drupal?) and presto! A literally global Photo Booth!

Of course, the real hack here is getting this script on to iMac G5s at Apple Stores around the world… hook it up to Riya and boom, now you can search for your friends getting kissy-kissy @ Apple Stores!

8 Comments

  1. heat said
    at 10pm on Jan 25th # |

    brilliant idea, and id be more than happy to put it in motion at my local apple store (soho, NYC)… of course, given instructions.

  2. Wy said
    at 1am on Jan 27th # |

    I actually worked for apple over the holidays and did this with my idisk. It works great, the thing that you need to be careful about is if you publish them, there is a rights issue. Somebody might get all lame about you publising the shots

    works like a charm tho, and you get some really good photos ;)

  3. Gary Allen said
    at 5pm on Feb 1st # |

    Great idea….but, the computers at Apple retail stores are completely restored from an Xserve every morning using Netboot. That’s why Apple can so successfully allow complete access to the computers when the stores are open, and yet be confident that they’ll turn on and operate the next day. So, even if you were able to install some scripts, etc., they’d be gone the next day. On the other hand, sounds like a great idea for Apple to implement!

  4. at 7pm on Feb 8th # |

    thanks for the idea

  5. fashionlover said
    at 11pm on Mar 26th # |

    hey where can i find a hack for photo booth so i can download it on my imac g4 and my ibook…

  6. at 11am on Mar 28th # |

    @fashionlover: not sure — I tried to get PhotoBooth to work on my Mac Mini and couldn’t figure it out.

    When it comes out, give Skitch a try!

  7. at 2am on Jun 9th # |

    Correct me if I’m wrong but I believe Photo Booth has no interface to AppleScript and therefore cannot be programmed in Automator. Too bad, I like your Idea though.

  8. at 7am on Jun 9th # |

    @Chrisoph: my request has actually been answered with FlickrBooth! Check it out!

4 Trackbacks

  1. [...] 2:33 by Marco
    World-Wide Photobooth

    I just wanted to give this idea some exposure: a World-Wide Photobooth, because I think it is brilliant and I should have come up with [...]

  2. [...] a year ago, I asked for someone to hack Photo Booth so that I could upload photos directly to Flickr. This would be useful at BarCamps, parties and, [...]

  3. [...] setup for us. I used an app called Flickrbooth (written by Tristan O’Tierney in response to a lazyweb request I had put out in January of 2006) to upload the photos directly to the BarCamp Flickr [...]

  4. charm on Feb 8th at 11am

    charm…

    I think you have a valid point here?….

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