epd is “Event Picture Displayer”. It came from an idea I’d had for a while now but hadn’t managed to get very far on. with the upcoming ApacheCon US I had a slight motivation to see if it was possible, and epd is the result.

The basic theory is that while at an event, e.g. a conference, you setup a projector and a computer in a public area. As people take pictures they upload them as usual and tell the event about them. This could be as simple as applying a particular tag in flickr or it may involve providing a URL of their photo album. However epd finds out about their pictures, they are retrieved and displayed.

Of course when I first suggested this people were shocked! How could I display their pictures? The answer is that the pictures have an obvious copyright statement added before they are made available for display. The aim isn’t to hijack peoples pictures, rather to provide them a wider audience.

Will it be useful? I have no idea. It took me a little while to write as I found my way round the flickr interface and I still haven’t added the “page scraping” required for HTML albums, but that shouldn’t be too hard.

The code all lives in an svn repository at http://david-reid.com/repos/public/epd/

Patches/comments welcome 🙂