Bieber Photographic A Photo Blog

15May/125

Automating Mass Portraits With QR Codes

For Mother's Day this year, my church decided to offer free portraits.  We did something similar for a back-to-school event last year, and while it was well-received it also ended with our communications director spending the better part of a week sifting through photos and breaking them up by family.  This time around, I decided to see if I couldn't automate that process, and in the end we managed to pull it off with almost no human post-processing effort, and no extra equipment aside from a box full of printed cards.  We sent everyone home with a card that gave them everything they needed to get their photos online the next day.  You can find all the code I wrote to make it work in the Github repository I set up for the purpose (click the "Zip" button at the top of the page if you just want to download everything).  You'll need Python to run my scripts, and a web server that supports PHP if you want to use the web viewer.  This is how I made the whole thing work, and how you can replicate the process.