ZapMachine

Revival of the old ZapMachine. A collage machine that merges random images layer by layer remaining about 50% of the original images

ApFab - Zap Machine V0.9.0

🄯 2009 - 2026 Fabian de Boer, Vincent Bruijne www.apfab.com

Zap stands for 'Zapped Artificial Picture', a collage made from Internet images. A Zap translates a set of words or a text into an image which reflects the visual representation of the words on the Internet.

This web application, Zap Machine, needs a number of words as input. It then takes the most relevant image that search engine Yahoo comes up with. After having collected all images the Zap Machine creates a given number of different collages from those images.

installation

First you need to run a server with PHP. Please do not use a Windows machine for this purpose, while Windows suck. ApFab recommends Linux or Mac;)

ApFab Zap Machine needs some PHP extensions:

• JSON (default installed)
• CUrl (default installed)
• Imagick (Image Magick image processing Class)

You need to acquire the following API key:

1. Brave Search API Key - https://api.search.brave.com/

Then set up your configuration:

# Create your local config from the template
cp conf/conf.local.php.dist conf/conf.local.php
# Edit it with your real keys
nano conf/conf.local.php

conf/conf.local.php is gitignored so your secrets stay safe. You can also set the BRAVE_API_KEY environment variable as an alternative.

Adjust permission (chmod 777) for 'sessions' folder, then run index.php in the www/ directory, fill in the form and voila.

yet to come

• Logfile also generated in imgProcess Class (0.9.2)
• Number and camera filename (virgin images) input (0.9.3)
• Proper stop meganism (0.9.1)
• better error handling: dead links give dynamicly generated image thats allso used in collage (0.9.3)
• visualisation of logfile, so viewers can see what is happening (0.9.1)
• replacing all 'random' image processing parameters (0.7)