Worked late last night to solidify the functionality of FOTOBlendr, my entry into the Adobe AIR Derby.  It’s an application for quickly building photo collages with community shared templates (in progress), as well as a free form tool using custom borders and slapping images on a Collage Canvas.

Currently, it supports the ability to grab images from Flickr, or your filesystem (there’s thumbnail generation going on, so it’ll take some time to import your local files, but they will be cached for next time).  Then the user can either throw all the images onto a Collage Canvas and then save it, or email it to their friends, or they can enter the Collage Builder mode where their taken to a screen that allows for custom layout.

Here’s the 3 minute guided tour

The Main Screen

This is where you get started:

1. Import images from the file system (this takes time as a thumbnail is being rendered for each image in a directory, it’s cached for future use, though).  Start with only a directory of 20 or so images, to see how it performs on your computer.
2. Adjust the size of the thumbnail (just like Adobe Lightroom).
3. Select the photos you want to build into a collage.  To select photos, press and hold the ctrl-key and select images.  Those selected will have a white border.  (Shift-selecting ranges of images works, too.)
4. After image selection, press either “I’m Lazy” for a jumbled mess of photos, or “Build Collage” to build your own custom collage.

The Custom Collage Building Screen with Templates

1. You come to this screen after pressing the “Build Collage” button on the main screen.  Here you can apply pre-build templates, or free-form layout your images.
2. Try selecting a template and watch your images fly onto the Collage Canvas.  Then try another template.  If you don’t have enough images selected, you’ll be warned when you try applying a template designed for more images
3. There’s lots of good stuff coming with templates: Background images, B&W backgrounds, etc…it’s going to be sexy.

The Custom Collage Screen with Custom Layout and Border Selection

1. If you don’t like the templates, create your own.
2. Press “Clear Collage” button to get a blank canvas.
3. Drag your mouse around, the image will be dropped on the canvas when you click.
4. Change the borders, by pressing either the “Choose Border” button which will bring up a menu of borders, or select “Shadow Border”, or “Sloppy Border”.
5. Resize your images by pressing the “["  or "]” keys.
6. Rotate your images with “,” and “.”
7. Cycle through available border with “K” and “L”
8. Press “H” for help.  (See below for a screen shot of all the keyboard shortcuts.)

The Border Selector

1. By pressing the “Choose Border” button, or the keyboard shortcut “B”, you’ll be presented with a preview of borders.  Select the border you like. 
2. In the future, there will be the ability for community members to create border-packs to share.  And the application will be able to filter from the web.

The Help Screen

1. Pressing “H” or the “Help” button will bring up the keyboard shortcuts available.

Email or Save the Collage 

After you are done with your collage save it to your local disk, or email it of to a friend (the resulting file isn’t very large).

Thanks for looking.

I’ll figure out a way to post the .AIR file soon.