What Is Photo Hack Day and Why It’s Important

This weekend, on June 1-2, we’re hosting Photo Hack Day for the 3rd time here in Berlin. It’s a 24 coding marathon where developers and designers meet to hack the future of photography. But what does that actually mean? Read on for some thoughts.

This weekend, on June 1-2, we’re hosting Photo Hack Day for the 3rd time here in Berlin. It’s a 24 hour coding marathon where developers and designers meet to hack the future of photography. But what does that actually mean? Read on for some thoughts.

Getting creative within 24 hours

Everyone has those ideas they carry around for ages without doing anything with it. Constructing a pinhole camera out of cardboard? Building that app that combines Twitter, Facebook and Google into one? Constructing a life-size X-Wing out of Lego bricks (oh wait, someone just did that)? You know what I mean.

A hackathon gives you the format to make these ideas become reality. Originally created in the late 90s by a bunch of developers, the hackathon is nowadays a well established concept within the tech scene. Participants usually got 24 or 48 hours to team up, get creative and work on their projects that are then being presented to the jury.

The fastest film scanner in the world

The winning hack of our last Photo Hack Day was Helmut. It’s an Android app that takes a photo of an analog film negative, transforms it into a positive and gives you all the settings you need to get a perfect low-res scan out of your film that you can immediately share.

The project was created by a group of five, myself included. While I carried the idea around for a while, it was Kostas, Maxim, Danilo and Carla, four very talented developers and designers, who joined the project and made it become reality. After winning Photo Hack Day the app was released on Google Play in April 2013, gets mostly five star ratings and sees a couple of thousand downloads every week.

More photo hacks

To get inspired you should also check out these photo hacks that were created during Photo Hack Days:

The Roll: developed by our very own Ramzi Rizk, Lukasz Wiszniewski and Victor Mark, the Roll re-organizes your camera roll and sorts it by the place and time you took your photo at.

Tourist Eraser: this Android app removes Tourists from your photos. Very useful for your next sightseeing tour.

Phudge: this app randomly “phudges” photos with other photos, thereby creating ever-surprising double exposures. This project was the winner of our first Photo Hack Day.

LoopCRT: filters animated gifs from Loopcam in the real world filter app that’s Insta CRT.

Snapsplosion: an iPhone app that creates a photo mosaic from your photos and thousands of photos nearby.

Let’s go: enter any place in this search engine and it shows you photos of that place.

Victor, Flo, Ramzi and Lukasz went to San Francisco in April to hack at Photo Hack Day at Facebook HQ.

Hacking the future of photography

What does that mean for you? It means that you’ve got the chance to build the next Helmut, or Snapchat, or Facebook Like button (which was conceived during a Facebook hackathon) at Photo Hack Day. The event is open for everyone. Even if you’re not a developer or designer you can join, bring in your ideas and see what you can createtogether.

We’ll have 24 hours, more than 20.000 €worth in prizes andEurope’s finest in tech & photography gathered at one amazing location. Come join in viawww.photohackday.com and hack the future of photography with us.

Not in Berlin? Let us know your thoughts and ideas in the comments below!