I use a GoPro Max 360-degree camera in my annual #StillStanding project. That means that I also have had an excellent chance to work with GoPro files and try to understand their inner logic. In this blog post, I will summarize some of my findings. What is recorded? Recording “a video” with a GoPro Max results in recording multiple files. For example, each of my daily 10-minute recordings ends up with something like this:

For my annual Still Standing project, I am recording 360 videos with audio and sensor data while standing still for 10 minutes. I have started exploring how to visualize the sensor data best. Today, I am looking into visualization strategies for 360-degree images. I have written about how to pre-process 360-degree videos from Garmin VIRB and Ricoh Theta cameras previously. The Theta records in a dual fisheye format like this:

I have previously written about how to resize all the images in a folder. That script was based on lossy compression of the files. However, there are also tools for optimizing image files losslessly. One approach is to use the .jpgoptim](https://github.com/tjko.jpgoptim) function available on ubuntu. Here is an excellent explanation of how it works. Lossless optimization As part of moving my blog to Hugo, I took the opportunity to optimize all the images in all my image folders.

A quick note-to-self about how I managed to download a bunch of photos from an iPhone and convert them to.jpg on my laptop running Ubuntu 22.04. As opposed to Android phones, iPhones do not show up as a regular disk with easy access to the DCIM folder storing photos. Fortunately, Rapid Photo Downloader managed to launch the iPhone and find all the images. Unfortunately, all the files were stored as HEIC files, using the High Efficiency Image File Format.

This is a note to self about how to programmatically resize and crop many images using ImageMagick. It all started with a folder full of photos with different pixel sizes and ratios. That is because they had been captured with various cameras and had also been manually cropped. This could be verified by running this command to print their pixel sizes: identify -format "%wx%h\n" *.JPG Fortunately, all the images had a reasonably large pixel count, so I decided to go for a 5MP pixel count (2560x1920 in 4:3 ratio).

Flickr has opened for uploading videos, or, rather, what they call “long photos”. As such, they are not trying to compete with YouTube or Vimeo, but rather making it possible to upload videos that are closer to a photography than a movie (i.e. with a narrative). I like this approach, and it resonates with how I am often recording a video as if it was a photography. The difference between what I could call a photo video and a movie video, can be seen as analog to the difference between music compostion/production and soundscaping.

I have been taking photographs for many years, and I wanted to see how I could develop this a little further. On a round-trip from Japan to Tanzania, as a participant in the [16th Ship for World Youth Programme]{style=“color: windowtext; text-decoration: none;”} organised by the Japanese government, I decided to work with my camera in the same way as I would think about improvising with a musical instrument. This was also inspired by David Crawford’s Stop Motion Studies where he is capturing the moment by projecting a series of still photos, shot right after each other, in a random sequence.