A fix for Snow Leopard has been created! (special thanks to Joshua!) Download it today!
If you are in the Philadelphia/South Jersey area, this photo booth is available for hire. Please contact me or Tweet me for more information. Also, if you are out of the area and need help customizing your photo booth scripts, I am also available to help out with that customization. (And if you need a string quartet or DJ for your wedding, I am a member of the Sounds of Silk String Quartet.) (and if you need a graphic designer, check out my other sister’s page… she designed the graphics for this entire wedding… check her out)
In the early stages of planning for my sister Helen’s wedding, we found advertisements to rent a real photo booth for the day. The company would wheel in a full size photo booth machine, like the ones you see in the arcades. The machine takes your guests photos, saves a digital copy, and then prints a photo strip for your guests to take home as a favor.
We liked the idea a lot, but didn’t want to spend the money (around $2,000 to rent!), so we decided that we would use our Macs, Automator, and some brainpower to create our own, personalized photo booth that would function exactly how we want it to, without costing us much.
I wrote an automator workflow that:
1. Prompted the user for their name (which was inserted in the filenames of the images)
2. took the user’s picture 3 times
3. arranged the photos vertically in a strip
4. displayed the photo strip to the user
5. printed the photo strip
6. saved both the individual images and photostrip pdf file in a folder on the mac
After the wedding, we then uploaded everybody’s images online to a photo album.
the hardware involved:
1. MacBook
2. EPSON PictureMate Dash printer (about $99 from amazon) – prints 4 x 6’s which we pre-printed with designs the date of the wedding on the sides
3. “Photo Booth” which we made out of an old wardrobe frame which happened to fit two seats, and colored shower curtains from IKEA
To see the photo booth in action, check out this quick clip below:
Thanks TUAW 
for posting about this!
Update 8/17/09 5:32PM: Please donate via the paypal button below to download the workflow. Paypal is having an issue with redirecting to the download page, so I’ll email you the application asap to your paypal email address. Thank you.
It took a lot of time to get this working properly! Play around with it, and let me know how your photo booth turns out! Thanks so much for all the comments!
I will still be manually emailing out the download link upon completion of your paypal donation. Thank you for your patience.
This application is for personal, non-commercial use only. Please contact me with any questions. Please keep in mind that PayPal takes a % of payments. (Donating a penny may be entertaining, but it ain’t gonna help me out.)
System Requirements: Mac running 10.5 or 10.6
Suggested: Built -in iSight camera
PS- I’m a 19 year old college student studying Information Systems at Drexel University, so donations are really helpful
questions? @dabido on twitter
Thank you to all those who have written about this
For Windows Users- you may be interested in this alternate program for Windows XP: http://seemonkey.net/
Any chance you’d like to share the automater file with us all?
Any chance you could share your Automator workflow for this??
)
[...] the case of Mac user David Cline, you end up with a very happy sister! During planning for his sister Helen’s recent wedding, [...]
This’s great. However, I’m a bit reluctant to put $3000 MBP out for public use. Maybe ideal for $350 Asus w/ hackint0sh. Thanks…
@Rick @Wes
I do plan on putting the application up somewhere, but I want to make a few more modifications to it, as it is still highly customized to our specific event.
Damn, I so want to do this for my sister’s wedding (in two weeks). Great idea!!
Do you still have the automator script?
Count me in! I would like to see the workflow also!
[...] the case of Mac user David Cline, you end up with a very happy sister! During planning for his sister Helen’s recent wedding, [...]
David –
I would love to have a copy of your set up with some instructions for customizing, etc., and I would love to give you a little something $$ wise for your efforts. Please email me ASAP.
Rob
Owner
DMEP
I’ll get in line for the Automator workflow if there’s any chance you’d share it. I’m getting married next month and would love to use it…it’s a fantastic idea!
What they said.
This is awesome…thinking about doing this for my brother’s wedding now. Care to share the automator script?
[...] the case of Mac user David Cline, you end up with a very happy sister! During planning for his sister Helen’s recent wedding, [...]
This is great! Well done, really smart.
My sister is getting married on 9th Sept. Any chance you could email me the script (even in its rough form) so I could play with it and do the same thing at her wedding.
I would also love it if you could share this with us. I’m actually having two weddings next month; one in Seoul, Korea (Sept 5) and one outside of Washington DC (Sept 19). I would love to be able to set up something like this for both. I think it’s a fantastic idea that people would love. My fiancee is moving from Korea to the US, so it would be a great way for her to remember friends at her big day.
I’ve never used automater so it would be a nice learning experience for me as well. I’ll keep an eye out for it : )
~Paik
I’d be interested in seeing the workflow too. My sister-in-law’s wedding is next month. Sounds like a great idea for a keepsake.
Thanks!
Great Job. Very cool. I’ve trying to figure out something like that for a long time…
Please share. Thanks.
[...] the case of Mac user David Cline, you end up with a very happy sister! During planning for his sister Helen’s recent wedding, [...]
[...] the case of Mac user David Cline, you end up with a very happy sister! During planning for his sister Helen’s recent wedding, [...]
[...] a US$99 printer, some Ikea shower curtains, and lot of wedding guests? In the case of Mac user David Cline, you end up with a very happy sister! During planning for his sister Helen's recent wedding, Cline [...]
[...] the case of Mac user David Cline, you end up with a very happy sister! During planning for his sister Helen’s recent wedding, [...]
This is brilliant, such a good idea!
But the automator doesn’t seem to be creating a PDF.
Also does it print automatically?
It prints to your default printer automatically.
You may need to poke around in Automator to see where the files end up, and you might need to tell Automator where those folders are
I just dl’d the script and I had to modify the directories since my laptop wouldn’t allow the script to create a folder in my root directory. It worked fine when I redirected everything to some folders on my desktop. Perhaps your zip file could include a directory tree that users could manually copy to their root folder and everything done would be inside a folder there.
So…
/ClinePhotoBooth/Snapshots
/ClinePhotoBooth/Strips
/ClinePhotoBooth/Images
I modified the script and those work.
Hey – this is awesome! I’ve thought about doing something similar to this with those Polaroid Pogo Camera/Printer but I like this a lot more!
Do you know if there’s a way to set up an external camera (for better quality) to do the same thing.
Thanks for the tip! I will update and re-upload.
I tried many different cameras with the Automator Action ‘take picture’ but I can’t seem to find a camera that it supports! The best results were from using the built in iSight
Is the automator action here? I can’t find it. And it’s not your your website.
The donate link works. I’ll be happy to donate first if this is the protocol.
Wondering if you had a step by step to get this working?
[...] the case of Mac user David Cline, you end up with a very happy sister! During planning for his sister Helen’s recent wedding, [...]
Hop over to the Donate button within the post and on the right-hand column. After donating you’ll be directed to the download link. Thanks much
Great idea! I downloaded the latest version. When I run it, it asks for my name, after entering name and pressing OK nothing happens. What am I doing wrong?
Thanks!!!
Did you copy the ClinePhotoBooth folder over to your Macintosh HD? Not having the directories in the right locations makes it seem to stop after the first prompt
Got it now, I still had 2.4, you snuck 2.5 in while I wasn’t looking
Everything works, and prints print out on Letter paper. I looked at the automator script, and could only see options for US Letter and A4 in the ‘New PDF Contact Sheets’ step. How can I change this so it will do 4×6? And is it possible to add a graphic like in your example at the top?
Thanks again!!!
I haven’t found a way to force automator to print a 4×6; what it does is print to the largest possible paper size of the available printer, which in our case was a 4×6 printer. In the step where it creates a pdf, you need to leave at Letter size, because the following cropping steps are dependent of that size. If you want to tweak, try playing with the steps that print out the image (which is the image file opened up in Preview) Good luck and let me know if you are successful! It would be nice to have this friendly with an 8.5 x 11 printer. But for now, I’d recommend using a photo printer like the epson dash that I used. much easier.
as for the graphic in the example, we pre-printed them ahead of time. we didnt want to get into Automator launching photoshop and applying layers!
Is there any other Donate option? I refuse to use PayPal because of an issue with them refusing to refund me money on a fraudulent transaction.
Unfortunately I’ve only set up PayPal to accept donations. I’ll email you the download link immediately following the payment. Thanks
[...] the case of Mac user David Cline, you end up with a very happy sister! During planning for his sister Helen’s recent wedding, [...]
@Dan : Learn how to read a post ..
“Update 8/17/09 5:32PM: Please donate via the paypal button below to download the workflow. Paypal is having an issue with redirecting to the download page, so I’ll email you the application asap to your paypal email address. Thank you.”
He has a problem with auto giving the link, so you have to mail him to get the link ..
Not a scam, the email should follow in a few minutes, mine did…
thnx kobayashi for explaining
i’m just a college student, so i don’t have any fancy check-out software or hosting services. just be patient as i respond to all your emails with the link
thanks again everybody. hope you’re all having photo booth fun today
Bought and works pretty nice.
just a coupla things that you may be able to clairify.
Can you make the photobooth preview screen any bigger? it is quite small. I’m sure people would like to pose for their shots.
is it a repeatable action? as you have to click on the automator robot each and every time. Be handy if it just went back to the name input.
Sucks about the printer thing but I may need a new printer anyways.
The preview screen is unfortunately stuck at that size;
I’ve tried to figure out other options, but couldn’t come up with anything.
The workflow is programmed to loop forever after each person; it may be stopping if your printer is not successfully printing(if it’s not plugged in or something)
If that’s not the case and it’s still not looping, let me know
exactly why… I dont have a proper printer hooked up! Buying the printer now!
So how does it feel to be the most popular kid on the internets?
(thanks for getting back to me in a timely manner)
I’ve found this workflow to work really well if you follow the directions. The one thing that I really liked from your video but that I didn’t see here is the ability to create a custom background for your photo strip pdf. Yours has the date and some small design elements. I’d really love to see a short tutorial on how you implemented that (again, I’m an automater virgin). I’m sure it’s something relatively simple.
Thanks so much for this though!
~Paik
Oops, sorry, I missed #35 and your response in #36. Ignore my post!
But again, I want to say thanks because it’s such a great tool!
~Paik
@Alex
it’s sort of exciting
especially brought me some joy while i sat at work today in a cube doing IT tickets
did you get the epson dash? its a cute little printer
thanks again
Very cool, would love to have the script for my cousins wedding but my paypal account is suspended. Gonna have to learn to use automater.
Thanks for the idea.
Oh man, if only I’d had this script a month ago when I whipped out my macbook’s photobooth app for my wedding! I still love the way the pics turned out, but this would have made it so much more like a photobooth.
Is there a suggested donation?
@Writtenbliss
Whatever you feel you can contribute is kind enough. Thank you
If you have a credit card, you can donate via paypal without a paypal account (i’m pretty sure that works)
Will this work on a PC??? unfortunately I don’t have a Mac, aww.
Thanks
Cheryl
you’re famous !!!
LA TImes front page:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/08/wedding-photo-booth-apple-macbook-mac.html
fun stuff, I made something similar two years ago, but with the MacBook hidden out of the way, using a rear-screen projection, but I love the idea that you make these custom printouts. Some photos are on Flickr
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ianus/tags/photobooth
I am so happy for your success. What a clever idea! And your willingness to share with other is wonderful.
Hi thanks for this I can’t wait to use it for our wedding. I was writing one myself and got stuck on the strip part can’t wait to see how you did it.
FYI paypal is still not displaying link after donations. just your email address
@Guillermo
I emailed you regarding the download. Thanks
@theycallmejane
Thank you! So happy it’s gotten out there
@cheryl
Sorry! but this is a Mac-specific application because it is based upon Mac’s Automator platform
[...] out David Cline’s original post about his DIY photo booth, and watch the video, [...]
Thanks for this – planning on using it for a party in a few weeks. If someone works out how to make the paper size default to 4 x 6 on a standard printer, then I’d love to know how.
Such a great idea! Will donate right now….wish I had a lot of money to donate to you but I will give what I can. Thanks for sharing this with us all!
[...] I could do it over, the sign isn’t the only thing I would change. David Cline, a 19-year-old college student, wrote an automator script that prompted guests for their names, [...]
Oh boy, you’ve been brought to the attention of Weddingbee – aka, thousands of crazy brides all planning their weddings. Most of which are probably going to desire your download. You’ve been warned
@Jmo
Bring ‘em on!!
Can I use a PC? Or is it specifically for a MAC? Do you have a PC option? or will you be coming out with one?
Thanks!
@SarahB
This script is based upon the Automator platform, which is an application that is pre-installed on Macintosh computers. Unfortunately there isn’t a simple way to port this over to PC’s. Thanks for checking it out
I’m trying to do the same thing, but use a camera attached to the laptop and a remote for pics. Basically, I just want to set up the printing part. Is there anyway I could use this app for that?
Thanks,
Mary
@Mary
Are you using a Mac? I would just go strictly with this app! It is completely automated and requires minimal control from your guests. They only have to type in their name to begin.
Hi, I’d love to purchase your automator but could you help customize it so it says our names?
Thanks so much David! I donated and downloaded the files last night (the paypal button works now). My question is: Can you use this with any other 4×6 printer? I’ve called every store in my town and no one has the EPSON. My wedding is in 2 days and I need to pick the printer up today. Thanks again in advance for a response.
Yes I have a cannon 4×6 printer and it works fine with that one.
Dude, just wanted to let you know what a hit this was at the wedding I shot tonight! The photo booth stayed busy the entire time.
I have a few things I’m gonna change about the way I set it up, but it was a huge success. Thanks!
@Ty
I’m glad the guests enjoyed it!
Thanks
[...] the case of Mac user David Cline, you end up with a very happy sister! During planning for his sister Helen’s recent wedding, [...]
Used this for a 21st birthday party last night and was a massive hit. One suggestion generally, I’d recommend setting your screensaver to display images from the Saved Images/Images folder: was great to have people able to see people’s previous attempts as they waited for the page to print.
[...] if you are interested in DIY-ing a photo booth for yours or for a love ones’ wedding, maybe this kid can help you set it up. Just click the [...]
[...] do you think about a photo booth at a wedding? More importantly.. What do you think about this photo booth at a [...]
This is an amazing idea! Will be making a donation and downloading the app soon.
Question: is there a way to change the code and prompt the automator to print out 2 copies? My idea is to let the guests keep one copy for themselves, and we’ll set up a station next to the photobooth with a scrapbook and tapes and pens so guests can tape the other copy onto the scrapbook and write a message.
[...] the case of Mac user David Cline, you end up with a very happy sister! During planning for his sister Helen’s recent wedding, [...]
This is great! Thanks! I am going to use it in my wedding next year…I was wondering though, if you would mind letting me know how to add the graphics on the sides so I can put my wedding info?
A brilliant idea, and well executed it seems. You seem to have earned the admiration of the folks over at Weddingbee.com. Let me tell you, if you’re still freelancing when my friends and I start getting into the whole wedding-planning frenzy that comes with getting older, you’ll have more work than you can keep up with.
[...] having a love affair with this at home photobooth automator thingy for Macs. I stumbled upon this awesome program by this kid named David Cline and was like “omg what an amazing idea!” and then, since I am very cheap about most [...]
I was inspired to play around with Automator after seeing this article. Here some additional thing I’ve come up with that helps solve/enhance the experience. My set-up is a little different because I wanted to use a Canon 20D to take the shots so I used the “Take Picture” function. 1 you can set a mouse button to open the application with a click. I set the roller ball (mighty mouse) to open my app. Having the wireless MM made it easy to place the GO button close to the subject. 2 I Set the desktop background to prompt the user to click it the preset roller ball so when the script is completed it’s ready for the next user with instructions to hit to button. 4 I had to make my own prompts with Keynote exported to quicktime running a 3,2,1 as the a “Pause 3 seconds” action simultaneously readies the camera to fire. I’m still trying to replicate all the nice things that the paid software has like live view. Right now all I have is a TV that I run the Video out directly to which is kinda messy and forces me to use 2 screens. Though I’d share. Thanks
Are you still renting it out, attended? I’m in NJ and getting married in July. LMK.
Hi there! This is truly awesome. I admire your ingenuity and persistence in making the program work. I am interested in renting the whole thing for a wedding next fall, or if its not too crazy hard, paying for the app and using my own App. What do you charge for the full rental? Any way to add standard text across the top or bottom of every printed-out photo (to use as favors) Thanks!! Please email me at taylchrs@gmail.com.
Thanks Dave for the great app for my wedding.
I added a bit to it to make it a bit more nerdy though.
I wanted to not only have the instructions displayed on a box while the program is running for the guest like it already has, but I also wanted it to be spoken. I felt it would make it more personal for the guests if both my fiance and I read the instructions to the guests as well.
Heres how I did it:
For each time the app brought up something that the guests had to read such as “Welcome to the photobooth…etc”, I recorded a mp3 file of both my fiance and I speaking it. For each recorded file, I placed it in its own separate iTunes playlist named 1,2,3,etc.
In the workflow right before a prompt would come up or a textbox would come up, I would add these actions:
1. Pause iTunes
2. Get specified iTunes Items (select the playlist for that part)
3. Play iTunes Playlist
It would then play the recording in the background and then prompt up with the textbox or whatever and continue running.
I did this for each part of the program.
I also added the action “Get Specified Text” and left it blank right before the initial “Ask for Text (Greeting)” because it would put the itunes wording in the blank if I didn’t.
FYI: I added the Pause iTunes part right before the first “Take Video Snapshot” because if a guest went ahead and pressed “Ready” quickly, there would be no point for the recording to still go on.
For the last part where it says you’re all finished, our recording also said something like “thanks for coming to the reception…etc” to add one more personal touch to it.
I hope this made some sense. I can tell already this is going to be a big hit at our wedding. Thanks again.
I was wondering does this use the webcam in the labtop or do you have an external digi cam? Also, how are the quality of the printed pictures because I was wondering if it will look better with a digital camera or the webcam pictures look fine?
Wow I am so happy I came upon the LA Times article because I am so excited about your program. I wanted to have a photobooth at our wedding but not pay 1500 for it. The fiance is going to be so excited. I do have a question before asking for a download link. Can I attach a webcam to my I-Mac g4 and use the program fine because I dont have a macbook or know anyone who has one i can use? Thanks!
@ Jon S
That’s great. I was thinking about adding sound queues, as some guests had a hard time hearing the ‘ding’ of the 3, 2, 1 countdown. Great ideas! Thanks for sharing
hey everyone, the workflow has been updated to work with Snow Leopard!