The theme for our school’s prom was “A Trip Down Memory Lane”. One organizer suggested that there should be a slideshow with childhood pictures of the graduating class. But with 300 students graduating and 2-3 childhood pictures per student, the feasibility of creating such a slideshow was quickly brought into question.
I was able to come up with a technical solution which allevaited these problems. First, I designed a simple PHP form which allowed parents to upload images of their student along with their name, the year it was taaken, and a short description. Given all this data, I then created a Python script which utilized the Google Slides API. The script simply iterated through the photos and metadata stored on my local machine and created the appropriate slides from a template. Generating the slideshow then only took about 15 minutes as compared to the multiple hours it would have taken for someone to manually create the slides, fill out the text boxes, and upload the pictures.
An example of the template slide:
And what it looked like filled in:
