When I attended the 2014 Salt Nashville Conference I met two really interesting brothers. Brad and Brian Sitton run Crowd Control Games in their spare time and have made some really fun an innovate computer applications.
The first video application I tried in a real production setting is called InstaPlayer (v3). It is a dynamic photo slideshow creator that beautifully displays square photos downloaded from Instagram (or any other photo source). The program is very simple in it’s form and does it’s core job very well.
Here are some key features that make InstaPlayer awesome:
- Target any folder as your photo library source
- Target your slideshow output to any monitor
- Refresh your photo library with a single click
- Layout your photos in 1, 2, 3 or 4 rows
- Optional text or .PNG image overlay (perfect for adding a hashtag on the screen)
- Works on both Mac and PC
- Non-square photos will be scaled to fit the space with black letter-boxing on the top and bottom
- Slideshow plays overtop other output windows like the one from ProPresenter
- Photo mosaic moves left and right slowly at a subtle rate
- Thin black border around each photo
You will need to find a way to download your photos from Instagram. You can use Instagrabber by Crowd Control Games which allows you to search a hashtag and select any photo you would like to download. A second option is to setup a recipe in IFTTT that downloads photos from Instagram with a specific hashtag and uploads them to a DropBox folder. One drawback from this option is that it takes IFTTT about fifteen minutes to automatically download your photos.
Buy InstaPlayer by Crowd Control Games
InstaPlayer User Interface
InstaPlayer Four Row Slideshow Preview
