With the new look website, came the need to generate two images of differing dimensions for post listings on the homepage. Cranking them out by hand was not hard, but by the time I’d faffed around trying to find a nice image, opened it in some photo manipulation software, scaled it and cropped it to size, twice over, I could easily have wasted 20 minutes or more.
This is what prompted me to write frigtool, a little application that takes a desired image width and height, then searches out some random flickr photos, scales them randomly, then crops a random region matching the desired width and height, finally outputting the image for saving. You’re unlikely to ever get the same image twice, even if the same source image is used.
To make it all a bit more interesting, I also wanted the ability to provide a few tags to refine the content of the images selected, as well as the ability to specify whether it should be my flickr photos that get used, or those from other flickr users who mark their photos with a suitable Creative Commons licence.
I have made it available for all to use via my website at http://www.jamescaws.com/frigtool/.
I envisage it being useful for designers who need to quickly obtain dummy filler images of a specific dimension to insert into a mock design. There are probably a heap of other uses for it too that I can’t think of — let me know in the comments below how and why you use it.
If you think the maximum image dimensions you can provide are a little on the tight side, this is because larger images would require a large original image to be obtained from flickr in the first place, which not only slows down the generation process, but also eats up my bandwidth. Depending on how much the utility gets used, I might eventually transfer it to another server with less bandwidth restrictions, at which point I’ll allow larger images to be generated.
Please use this post’s comment facility to report any bugs, provide suggestions or simply let me know how you find it performs.