poladroid on linux

you might not have come across poladroid…it’s an applic­a­tion that con­verts a digital image so that it resembles those taken with  classic polar­oid cameras.

it’s only avail­able for windows and mac…not linux. i wasn’t going to let that stand in my way. down­load the windows version and, assum­ing you’ve got wine installed (i’m using version 1.01),  extract the installer from the zip, open a ter­minal and enter ‘wine POLADROID Installer.msi’. this will start the usual process of installing a windows app.

poladroid can now be found in the wine section of the applic­a­tions drop down (at least it does in ubuntu 10.04).  start the program and it should look a bit like this…

in the windows version you can drag a photo onto the camera to start the process. this doesn’t work for me on linux. i have to click the blue circle and choose ‘convert jpeg file’. you can then browse to the loc­a­tion of the jpeg you want to convert. and then there’s another glitch. when i’ve run this on windows a small polar­oid image appears and devel­ops gradu­ally (as a real polar­oid would)…not so under gnome. there’s a buggy rect­angle with nothing inside it. don’t be too con­cerned by this though as the program’s still running and pro­cessing the image. after a while (quite a few minutes) a new jpeg should appear in the folder along­side the ori­ginal image. this is your new poladroided picture!

i love the pro­cessing the applic­a­tion applies…here’s an example…click to view it in all it’s glory…

there’s also a flickr group devoted to images pro­cessed with this lovely little bit of soft­ware. have fun :)