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 roof line 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 roof line with my yard stick somewhere in the photo.
Note the three yardsticks floating end to end on the front of my house.
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 roof line to get a pretty good estimate within a few inches!
And, no, you don’t have to climb on your roof or do anything dangerous with a yard stick in your hand. Just have a partner hold the yard stick in the air in your photo or rest it flat against what you want to measure.
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.
You can also pickup the uPhotoMeasure software package which does about the same thing as my little yardstick trick but with much less computer knowledge needed. You just 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.
The really cool thing about uPhotoMeasure is that it not only grabs two dimensional measurements that are straight on, but it can also figure out three dimensional measurements from different angles. That’s the real power of this software. It comes with a web-based subscription that’s set up to be billed on a monthly basis or you can buy and download the whole package.
The uPhotoMeasure software used to be known as iPhotoMeasure and though I don’t think iPhotoMeasure is supported anymore it does appear that you can still download a free version of iPhotoMeasure if you just want to check it out.
Overall I think I like my digital photo trick with the yardstick best of all for simple measurements with a digital camera. This trick is free, but it only works when you take the photo at a straight angle and with a yard stick or other type of ruler in the photo. You will have to know a little bit about photo editing, but you can’t beat the price.
Good article,
I like the uPhotoMEASURE program the best! It works, easy to use and I won’t have to climb on the roof four times:
1. to place your yardstick (by the way which is huge)
2. come down and take the picture
3. climb back up to remove the yard stick
4. climb back down. And you would have to do that with every picture!
The risk of a slip is worth more than the $99.00 to me.
Thanks!
Heh… In reality I would just use a lean the yardstick flat against something and take the photo head on. I wouldn’t actually climb up on the roof and tape it up there :-) In my photo it’s actually 3 yardsticks end to end, but now that I look at it I can’t see the break, either… My photo editing skills leave a lot to be desired!