Of coding and a history of iPhone photo filter apps

I had last week off work, mostly due to being in desperate need of a holiday, I didn’t go anywhere but just chilled out at home. I did do a bunch of coding on my website though!

I’d been using Tumblr to post my random snaps from 2009 to about 2016 or so and cross-posting them to Twitter, before I found that Tweetbot had custom image posting functionality where you could post images to a URL that replied with a specific format and Tweetbot would use those image URLs in its tweets. I added functionality for that on my website and had been saving tweets and images directly since 2016.

Last year, it occurred to me that I should import my posts from Tumblr to my website in order to have everything in one place. I obsessively tag my Flickr photos and as a result am able to find almost anything I’ve taken a photo of very quickly, and while I hadn’t quite gone to those same levels of tagging with Tumblr, all my posts there had at least some basic tags on them that I wanted to preserve when bringing them in to my website, so I had coded up a tags system for my Media page and a script to scrape the Tumblr API and suck the posts, images, and tags in. I also wrote a very simple little React app to be able to continue adding tags to new posts I’m making directly to my website.

The one thing that was missing was the ability to see all of the current tags, and to search by tag, so this past week I’ve been doing exactly that! I have a page that shows all the tags that exist with links to view just the posts tagged with a given tag, and on the front page the tags that a post has are clickable as well.

I realised I had mucked up the tagging on a few posts so was going through and re-tagging and updating them, and it struck me just how much I used to rely on those camera filter apps to hide how shit photos from old iPhones used to be. One of the ways I’d tagged my photos on Tumblr, and I’ve continued this even now with the new direct-posting-via-a-custom-iOS-shortcut that I’ve got set up on my iPhone, is with the name of app I used to edit the photo. Going roughly chronologically as I started using each app:

Instagram was only a very brief foray, and VSCOCam was by far my most-used app. Unfortunately it went downhill a couple of years ago and they Androidified it and now all of the icons are utterly inscrutable and you also can’t get RAW files taken from within the app back out again in anything but JPEG. Apparently there’s a thing called a VSCO Girl which I suspect is part of what happened there.

My most recent editing app prior to getting the iPhone 11 Pro has been Darkroom, it’s extremely slick and integrates directly with the regular photo library on your phone and offers a similar style of film-esque presets to VSCOCam, though fewer in number.

With the iPhone 11 Pro, however, the image quality is good enough that I don’t even feel the need to add obviously-film-looking presets to the images. I take the photo, hit the “Auto” button in Photos.app to add a bit of contrast, and usually use the “Vivid” preset to bring the colours up a bit, but otherwise they’re pretty natural-looking.

That said, I’ll probably end up heading back to Darkroom at some point as I do like my film aesthetic!

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