How to build your own aerial image Twitter bot

About a year ago I built a small Twitter bot that posts an aerial image of Hamburg, Germany every day.

As I will shut it down (no reason, just decluttering) here’s how it works so you can run your own:

1. Have aerial images with a permissive license
2. Register a Twitter account and set it up for posting via API access
3. Write code to pick an image and post it

Done!

Okok, I am kidding.

I used https://suche.transparenz.hamburg.de/dataset/digitale-orthophotos-belaubt-hamburg3 as data source because they have a CC-BY like license, allowing such a project without any legal complications. As a side benefit these images are already provided in tiles: There is not one big image of the whole region but 1km² image tiles. Perfect for random selection, quick resizing and posting.

Registering a Twitter account and setting it up is a privacy nightmare and, being a good human being as you are, you ought hate any part of it. I followed the Twython tutorial for OAuth1 in a live Python interpreter session which was fairly painless. If you do not want to link a phone number to your Twitter account (see above for how you should feel about that), this approach worked for me in the past but I bet they use regional profiling or worse so your luck might differ.

Next you need some code to do the work for you automatically. Here is what I wrote with PIL for the image processing and Twython for posting:

import glob
import random
from io import BytesIO

from PIL import Image
from twython import Twython

## Initialise Twitter
# use a Python interpreter to follow the stops on 
# https://twython.readthedocs.io/en/latest/usage/starting_out.html#oauth-1-user-authentication 
# don't rush, there are some intermediate keys iirc...
APP_KEY = '1234567890ABCDEFGHIJKLMNO'
APP_SECRET = '12345678901234567890123456F8U0CAKATAWAIATATAEARAAA'
OAUTH_TOKEN = '1234567890123456789123456F8U0CAKATAWAIATATAEARAAAA'
OAUTH_TOKEN_SECRET = '123456789012345678901234567890FFSFFSFFSFFSFFS'
twitter = Twython(APP_KEY, APP_SECRET, OAUTH_TOKEN, OAUTH_TOKEN_SECRET)

## Prepare the image
# via https://twython.readthedocs.io/en/latest/usage/advanced_usage.html#posting-a-status-with-an-editing-image

# Pick the image
jpegs = glob.glob("DOP20_HH_sommerbefliegung_2019.zip/*.jpg")
todays_image = random.choice(jpegs)
print(f"Today we will post {todays_image}")
photo = Image.open(todays_image)

# Resize the image
basewidth = 1000
wpercent = (basewidth / float(photo.size[0]))
height = int((float(photo.size[1]) * float(wpercent)))
resized_photo = photo.resize((basewidth, height), Image.ANTIALIAS)

# "Save" the resulting image in temporary memory
stream = BytesIO()
resized_photo.save(stream, format='JPEG')
stream.seek(0)

## We've got what we need, let's tweet
license = "dl-de/by-2-0 (Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg, Landesbetrieb Geoinformation und Vermessung)"
tweet = f"Das ist #IrgendwoInHH, aber wo denn nur?\n\n#codeforhamburg\n\nBild: {license}"

response = twitter.upload_media(media=stream)
twitter.update_status(status=tweet, media_ids=[response['media_id']])

First we initialize that Twython thingie, then we pick a random image from a directory of .jpg files, then we resize it to a maximum of 1000 pixels (you can simplify that if your images are square…) and finally we post it to Twitter.

Set up a cronjob or systemd timer or alarm clock to run the script as often as you like and that’s it.