hytheaway

not that long ago, i was working on a super secret project.



"what kind of project?"

the secret kind. don't worry about it.

regardless, i found myself needing to compare two images that should be completely identical, but i needed to be sure. i needed to know, beyond reasonable doubt, that these images were, for all intents and purposes, the same.

doing what any sane person does, i found the first image diff tool online and started batch uploading these pairs of images. of course, this world being what it is, and with money costing... money, i guess... i was only able to compare like 4 pairs of images before being prompted to pay an extra fee.

i mean, i could've. it would've saved me some time. but what kind of precedent would that have set? how utterly trivial would something have to be for me to finally put my foot down and not pay for it?

i shan't disgrace my name like that!

...or something along those lines.
in reality, i was incredibly motivated to not enter my credit card information into the first website i found that vaguely accomplished my goal. there's no reason for yet another completely faceless and morally removed incorporated business to have access to my personal information. besides, how hard could it be?

i've said that line a lot on this website before, always preceding one of the most complicated and difficult projects i've faced. and yet, for some reason, i can't help thinking that. my success rate of "build a trivial thing to expedite this process" is, honestly, remarkably low, but my brain somehow manages to convince myself that this time, it'll be different. every time.

for once, maybe i wasn't so wrong after all. maybe i'm getting better at learning my limits and skills. or maybe i just got lucky this time.

either way, i present to you the most utility of utility tools i've yet built: image-diff.py. you give it two images, tell it where you want to export to, and then it highlights the difference between the two images.

have fun.