Ghettovision

Our dog Ollie growing up, 2019 to 2026: 444 photos at five per beat, set to Spoon’s “I Turn My Camera On”. Made with Ghettovision.

Ghettovision is a little shell script that turns a folder of images into a rapid-fire video, the way Pummelvision did.

Background

In December 2010, Vimeo co-founder Jake Lodwick launched Pummelvision. It pulled your photos from Facebook, Flickr and Tumblr and flashed them all past you in a fast video, set to music. Your life, flashing before your eyes. Pummelvision since shut down.

In November 2011 I wrote a local version that produced a similar effect on my own computer, for my whole photo archive (“I’m doing 2k images here,” says one of the commits). No fancy beat detection and other cool features Jake had, but it does the trick!

How it works

  1. Read a folder of images
  2. Letterbox each one to 1280x720 with ImageMagick, or crop it to fill whatever size you pick
  3. Encode them into an H.264 video at 7.5 frames per second with ffmpeg. 7 was too slow; 8 was slightly too fast.
  4. Add your own music and enjoy
brew install imagemagick ffmpeg
./pummelize.sh ~/Desktop/madjpgs
./pummelize.sh -s 960x720 -c -r 25/3 ~/Desktop/ollie  # 4:3, cropped to fill, 5 frames per beat

The 2011 version used mencoder. In 2026 I switched it to ffmpeg and added a script that pulls slides out of Google Slides, PDF and PowerPoint files, so you can pummel a slide deck too.

Code is on GitHub. Thanks Jake for the idea.