Well, another year, another idea for my domain pictero.com. I was about to get rid of that domain for good. But here we are. This time I spend a little more time in a “product” - or whatever you want to call it and I came up with this idea:

A (mostly) browser based toolbox for a couple of common, simple image editing tasks:

  • resizing, cropping and color adjustments
  • pattern generation with a couple of different algorithms
  • adding annotations like text or shapes
  • showing common social media formats
  • OCR extraction with tesseract, in the browser
  • simple animations like Ken Burns
  • ASCII-converter
  • steganography
  • and of course EXIF data viewer, reverse image search, etc.

So there’s a lot to explore here. Some functions require a backend, like I built in an “AI image identifier”. Also the user has (very limited) access to some free external image databases, like picsum.photos or unsplash.com . As CORS would block requests like that, I implemented a server side proxy for that.

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