This walkthrough guides you through a typical setup for the Booru Webcam 2.0.
When you start the program for the first time, you will have a webcam icon the the Windows tray menu. You will also have a preview window where you eventually will see the web camera images.
By clicking on the tray icon with the left mouse button you will toggle the visibility of the preview window on and off. So if you sometime is missing the preview window you can try clicking on the tray icon.
You move the preview window by pressing down the left mouse button anywhere in it and then moving the mous while keeping the button pressed.
Now, place the preview window at a suitable place on your desktop.
The first thing we want to do is to select an image source. The image source is the device that feeds images to your computer. An image source can be a webcam, camcorder, digital camera, TV card etc. You will have at least one image source for every working imaging device connected to your PC.
Click the right mouse button in the preview window or on the tray icon. This will bring up a popup menu. Select the "Camera" menu item. This will bring up a sub-menu with the input sources listed. If there is no source connected there will just be a menu item called "None" selected by default. Click on the image source you wish to use to capture images. (Most users only have one webcam installed, and in that case there will only be one image source in the list to select from.)
Now you should see the images from your webcam in the preview window.
You can change the image size, update frequency or other properties that your webcam offers by selecting the menu items "Camera->Settings..." or "Camera->Image Format...". These properties will be vary depending on the capabilities of your web camera.
Now when we see the images from our web camera we will add some overlay images and text
Select the "Options..." item from the program menu (right click in preview or on the tray icon). This will bring up the Options dialog where most of the parameters for the program can be manipulated.
To make the images from the webcam a little bit more fun you can add image overlays. An image overlay is an image that is put ontop of the web camera image. The image can have varying levels of transparency in different areas.
Activate the "Image Overlay" icon on the left side of the options dialog window. Click the "Enable Image Overlay" checkbox to activate the image overlays.
Change the "File" setting to point out the "Subtitle.png" that is provided in the Booru Webcam images directory (in the same directory as the Booru Webcam executable). Now you will see a half-transparent image on top of your webcam images.
Change the "Placement" setting to "Bottom left", and the "Margin" setting to 10.
Now, activate the "Text Overlay" icon in the left side of the options dialog window. Press the "Enable Text Overlay" checkbox to activate the text overlays.
Set the options for the text overlay as the following:
| Text | Booru - %t |
|---|---|
| Color | White |
| Placement | Bottom Left |
| Horiz. margin | 56 |
| Vert. margin | 22 |
The "%t" will expand to the current time (see string expansions in the manual)
At this stage we have a preview window that shows the images with a subtitle. The next step is to either A, save the images to the disc or B, publish the images on the web through FTP or C, both A and B.
Select the "Image and FTP" options in the settings dialog. In the "Image Capture" section there are three options. "Interval", "Format" and "Quality". Change the interval to 60, which means that images will be saved once every 60 seconds.
Format should be "JPEG"
Make the option "Enable Save Image" checked and fill out it's Filename to "c:\temp\image-%t".
The string expansions are also usable in this case. What will happen is that every 60 seconds a file will be stored to the C:\temp directory. Each time there will be a new image with a timestamp in it's name. This effectively make Booru Webcam a simple image archiver. See the manual section on Save Image for more information on these settings.
Make the option "Enable FTP Upload" enabled. Enter an URL to your ftp-account (see the manual pages on FTP Uploads). String expansions can be utilized also in these settings.
The settings you have done so far will have your webcam serving high quality images to either your local disc, FTP account or both. Observe that the settings are persistent and the next time you boot up Booru Webcam, images will automatically be published onto the web if the FTP Upload option was enabled.