Show HN: PhotosCovered – Turn Facebook Photos into Composite Cover Photo

I’ll start off by saying I realize hackernews isn’t a great target market for a facebook application. This was a weekend project idea I wanted to play around with for awhile now, so I’m mostly just showing hn for general commentary.

So I wanted to build a facebook application that took all your friends profile pictures and built a composite image out of them the size of the facebook cover photo...so a montage of all your friends for your cover photo. Turns out, facebook removed the friends list endpoint from their api a couple months ago.

So I opted instead to allow users to select their photo albums and then build a composite image out of the photos in those albums. The user can also overlay custom text onto the their new cover photo.

A few random notes:

- The interesting part of this was getting the image sizes, rows and columns laid out correctly for any possible number of images. I’m sure there are elegant ways to do this that I didn’t think of, but I was pretty happy with my solution and how it turned out.

- The php GD image processing library was very useful, but appears pretty slow when processing a lot of images. Again, I’m sure there are more efficient ways to do this (like, not using PHP perhaps), but this does the job and made overlaying text very simple. I’m not sure how well the server will hold up to multiple or many users using it at the same time, however.

All in all, a fun exercise. I’ll likely be tossing the source up on github soon.