Electric Pi

Electric Pixer

(Jump to download instructions)

Electric Pixer is a small, easy-to-use application that adds "in-image" captions to photos by increasing the size of the image and placing the the text into the image but outside the original picture. Here is a sample photo and the result of adding a caption in Electric Pixer:

Note that the image has been expanded to accommodate both the original image and the caption and the caption does not infringe on the original image. The size of the text is controlled by the user. In addition, the original image is never overwritten, rather the captioned images are saved in a separate folder.

Electric Pixer allows a folder of images to be quickly captioned. After the caption for a photo is entered, the image is processed in the background and the user can immediately begin working on the next image. There are shortcut keys for moving between images and starting captioning so the application can be run quickly from the keyboard without mouse interaction. Here is a screen shot of Electric Pixer being used to caption a folder containing multiple images:

Installing and Running Electric Pixer

Electric Pixer requires Java 5.0 or greater and is available as an executable JAR file or a Java Web Start application.

JAR File

Click here to download the JAR file.

On Windows, if you have Java 5.0 or later installed, you should be able to simply double-click on the JAR file to start the application. From the command line you can run:

You can download the Java runtime here. (You'll need the J2SE Runtime Environment.)

Java Web Start

Note that we generated and signed our own certificate, so you will see a Java warning when using this option. If you don't feel comfortable granting access to this application, please download and use the JAR file (above) which will run without the warning.