Last weekend, I had the pleasure of presenting Aviary’s API and judging at Photo Hack Day Berlin, organized by our friends at EyeEm.
The event was kicked off Saturday morning with the usual parade of API presentations, followed by team pitches. More than 120 developers and designers spent the next 24 hours turning endless cups of coffee and bottles of Club-Mate into 37 beautiful photo hacks.
One of the standouts, Makiary, was a hardware hack by Hany Rizk that allowed users to apply Aviary photo filters to a photo by tapping a piece of paper with a button drawn on it.
Another favorite was Snap Cat, “an app for cats, by cats”, which won for best use of the Aviary API! The app shows a red ball bouncing on the screen. When your cat tries to grab the ball, it takes a photo which you can edit using the Aviary SDK before sharing with your friends. “Because if the internet needs more of anything, it’s cats”. The app is already live in the Google Play Store, and there’s even a web version that you can try out here. Congratulations to Danielle, Lukasz, Matias, Tobi, Victor for Snap Cat!
1st Place: Photoration
See a photo that you love and want to take yourself? Photoration might be able to help you out. One of the apps pitched after the opening API demos, Photoration allows users to choose a beautiful photo using the EyeEm API, and shows that photo on a map with instructions on which direction to face, and what time of day to take it. Congrats to Albert Poghosyan, Stefan Adolf, Robert Tochman-Szewc and Gabriele Negro for Photoration!
2nd Place: Ambeer
Ambeer has “nothing to do with beer other than that it’s from me”. A psychedelic hardware hack, Ambeer uses Imagga’s API to extract the five primary colors from a photo and creates a light show using a hand-built, usb-connected lighting stack. Congrats to Christian Male for Ambeer!
3rd Place: DIGITALANALOG
DIGITALANALOG is an art project by Alan Don Jones. A hack in two parts, DIGITALANALOG explores the intersection of digital vs analog photography and our interactions with both mediums. The first part explores representing animated GIF’s as an analog Polaroid photograph. Part two explores how a camera flash could be manipulated to re-create digital effects. Alan managed to replicate certain EyeEm photo filters using bits of trash taped to an iPhone flash. You can find the full gallery here. Congrats to Alan Don Jones for DIGTALANALOG!
Photo Hack Day Berlin was a ton of fun, and I was very inspired by the technical prowess and creativity coming out of the Berlin tech scene. A big thank you EyeEm for hosting an amazing event!
