I suspect that by now everyone and their grandmother has written a script to convert photos so they look like Polaroids. Yesterday I spent a slow morning at work replacing all our slideshows (which used a super-ugly Flash control) with these:
There’s plenty of other neat effects that could be done.. maybe add a bit of aging or apply some filters. But I think it looks pretty good. The following script uses Python, PIL (Python Imaging Library), and a pre-drawn “polaroid” frame.
import PIL, time, glob, random, os, sys from PIL import Image, ImageOps, ImageEnhance, ImageDraw, ImageFont # Generate Polaroid-looking images def make_polaroid(infile, outfile, text=''): base = (300,320) #size of polaroid background polaroid = Image.open('polaroid-0.png') polaroid = ImageOps.fit(polaroid, base, Image.ANTIALIAS, 0, (0.5,0.5)) target = (272,248); # size of empty target area on polaroid background img = Image.open(infile) img = ImageOps.fit(img, target, Image.ANTIALIAS, 0, (0.5,0.5)) #enhance the image a bit img = ImageOps.autocontrast(img, cutoff=2) img = ImageEnhance.Sharpness(img).enhance(2.0) #draw the text, if any font = ImageFont.truetype("arial.ttf", 16) text_size = ImageDraw.Draw(polaroid).textsize(text, font=font) fontxy = (base[0]/2 - text_size[0]/2, 278) ImageDraw.Draw(polaroid).text(fontxy, text, font=font, fill=(40,40,40)) #copy the image onto the polaroid background imgcorner = (14,20) #paste image onto polaroid polaroid.paste(img, imgcorner) #copy the whole thing onto a larger background and rotate randomly angle = random.randint(-10,10) blank = Image.new(polaroid.mode, (400,400)) blank.paste(polaroid, (blank.size[0]/2-polaroid.size[0]/2, blank.size[1]/2-polaroid.size[1]/2)) blank = blank.rotate(angle, Image.BICUBIC) blank.save(outfile) if __name__ == "__main__": # Takes 1 required argument -- the desired prefix for the output filename if len(sys.argv) < 2: print "Missing required positional argument 'prefix'" exit() # Text to appear on image, use "" if none text = "Some Text, or leave blank" # Erase everything in Output folder for f in glob.glob('output/*'): os.remove(f) # Create Polaroids of each JPG in Input folder files = [f[6:] for f in glob.glob('input/*.jpg')] for f in files: make_polaroid('input/'+f,'output/'+sys.argv[1]+'-'+f[:-4]+'.jpg',text) # Write index.html so Output folder can be copied/renamed elsewhere files = [f[7:] for f in glob.glob('output/*')] outhtml = open('output/index.html','w') outhtml.write("<html><head></head><body style='background-color: #000;'><div align='center'><p>") for i in range(len(files)): outhtml.write("<img src='%s' />" % (files[i])) if (i+1) % 2 == 0: outhtml.write("</p>") outhtml.write("</div></body></html>") outhtml.close()
The script is a bit over-specialized to my purpose .. converting a bunch of individual folders one at a time. So you may need to hack on it a bit to suit your needs. You can download the script here: polaroid.zip. Place files you want to convert into the “input” folder. Run the script with a single argument for the output filename prefix. It will take a few seconds or minutes to run, depending on how many photos you’re converting. When it finishes, copy the “output” folder elsewhere. The file “index.html” is pre-generated to contain all the photos in the folder.