Introducing the Ken Burns Effect in Pictor's Slideshow

I'm a big fan of documentaries.  Especially Ken Burns documentaries.  The National Parks, Jazz, Baseball,  Huey Long -- I love them all!

Ken Burns is particularly famous for a special effect (known as The Ken Burns Effect) of zooming and panning across still pictures.  It's both brilliant and beautiful.

I recently came across an implementation of The Ken Burns Effect written in Javascript, by Will McGugan, introduced in his blog here:

• http://www.willmcgugan.com/blog/tech/2011/2/26/ken-burns-effect-with-javascript-and-canvas/

I contacted Will and he was gracious enough to put an AGPL header on his source and I have added it to Pictor.  Now, if you click on the screensaver link on a Pictor picture page, you can cycle through your album in order and your pictures are panned and zoomed like a Ken Burns documentary!

All you need to do is:

1. Install Pictor
   

   sudo apt-get install pictor

2. Symbolically link some albums into /usr/share/pictor/pictures
   

   sudo ln -sf $HOME/Pictures /usr/share/pictor/pictures

3. Point a browser to your server's pictor instance
   http://localhost/pictor
4. Click on an album, click on a picture, and then click screensaver, as below:

Will released his code here as kenburns-1.0.0.zip, which I was thinking of packaging for Ubuntu (rather than statically including it in Pictor).  Would that be useful to anyone else?

:-Dustin