Remember those little stickers that you used to get on photos which told you if you had failed in some fashion? Well, the digital age put paid to them, and people are posting images with fake defects willy-nilly.

I have created a web tool that gives you those stickers back, like this:


Grab a jpg of the image, upload it and choose what is wrong with the image. The server will apply a Quality Control sticker to it and return it. Stickers cover Instagram abuse, cats, HDR, fake Tilt Shift images and more. I’ve a few more I need to make over the next few days, and they’ll be added when they are ready.

http://www.worldofpaul.com/filmerror/

I advise looking at your friends’ Twitter and Facebook posts and moderating them, posting the quality control results on your friends’ timeline.

Have fun!

It was you who was the source of this! Good job!

I was egged on by a couple of others...

Now maybe it's because I'm too much of a young whippersnapper, or maybe it's because I was just too perfect a photographer, but I don't recall ever seeing one of these such stickers, although Googling last night provided some enlightenment. Can anybody provide some context as to when they'd be applied, or a link to some article about them somewhere or anything to make me a little bit wiser?

I used to see them from time to time. They would be stuck onto your photos when, say, it was horribly out of focus, badly exposed or the camera (or you) had failed in some other fashion. These days with digital photography, you don’t get this any more, even though it is still possible to focus badly, expose incorrectly or, through the use of apps like Instagram, fake light leaks, fogging and other stuff. TBH, if your analogue camera was doing this all the time, it was a message that you should be considering buying a new one. These days, people are putting Instagram on their iPhone 5s.

Anyway, for a bit of a laugh, I thought this would be an interesting thing to do, and it was an interesting exercise in doing stuff with the GD library in PHP.

I never got these but then again I was using standard compact cameras at the time.

Can we have an iOS app of it, please?

Mark

I thought I'd get on Facebook and start dispensing some Boots Chemist style justice on such pictures, only to find nearly all of my contacts don't make such poor judgements.

I know so many peeps that use Instagram and that other, similar app that I'd not have enough time applying this to their images and then posting them online.

Mark

It works nicely on an iPad. Sadly iOS programming is beyond my abilities.

If only we knew someone who could. Someone who's possibly recently been interviewed for a position at Apple perhaps. I don't know. Probably too much to dream for.

I see what you did there.

Mark

I saw it too.

I changed the way it presents the finished image yesterday. Hopefully your ISP or browser hasn't cached the JavaScript file. Flush that cache!