Note the three yardsticks floating end to end on the front of my house.

When I was putting up my Christmas lights a few months ago it struck me that I have no idea how long of a string a lights I’d really need because I didn’t really know how long my roofline was when I included the peak at the front of my house. I could have climbed up on a ladder and tried to measure the entire length, but that’s would have been a time-consuming and slow process seeing how I didn’t want my wife up on the roof with me holding the other end of the tape measure.

If I had been a little more clever I could have used my digital camera and a yard stick to get a fairly accurate measurement. All I would have needed to do was place a yard stick somewhere in my photo (preferably flat up against a straight surface) and then taken a front-facing photo of my roofline with my yard stick somewhere in the photo.

If you know anything about digital photo editing then you can pretty much guess the next step. Even the basic digital photo editing programs have the ability to copy sections of photo from one to another. All I would have had to do was copy my yard stick and then paste new copies of it end to end along my roofline to get a pretty good estimate within a few inches!

If, however, you’d rather not learn how to do all this in your favorite digital photo program, then there are software packages available to help you.

iPhotomeasure takes all the work out of using a digital camera to measure lengths.

For $99 you can pickup the iPhotoMeasure software package which does about the same thing as my little yardstick trick but with much less computer knowledge needed. You just place a white 15 inch by 15 inch square plate somewhere in your photo, take a picture and then load the photo into the software. With a few clicks it has figured out the exact dimensions of everything in your photo and you can just drag your mouse along any line to get a pretty accurately measured length.

You can also try the free but slightly confusing ImageJ program. I loaded this up and fiddled with the menus and commands for a while before I was able to figure out the basics of taking measurements. Again, you’ll need to have something in your digital photo for which you know the exact measurements.

Overall I think I like my digital photo trick with the yardstick best of all. And you certainly can’t beat the price!