An unexpected benefit of Primitive is that it helps create really cool animations (both by screen-recording the Primitive app as it renders the shapes for the image, and by working with SVG animation libraries on the web).

I played around with it a couple years ago (https://minimaxir.com/2016/12/primitive/) and it worked out surprisingly well.

You might be interested in Synthetik Studio Artist (https://synthetik.com/). Among (many!) other things, it can process images and animations and output SVG. There are operations that produce Primitive-style pictures, but also a huge number of others. And it's customizable! A graphics rabbit-hole...

This sort of thing is useful for showing placeholder images while high-res images load: https://jmperezperez.com/svg-placeholders/

I've written my own placeholder image generator based on Delaunay triangulation inspired by this blog-post. The generator produces reasonable placeholder images at about 300 bytes. The overall effect is not as nice as the images produced by Primitive though. However, Delaunay triangulation is deterministic and relatively fast. Furthermore, the triangles can be efficiently serialized as triangle strips.

In case anyone is interested, the code is on GitHub [1].

[1] https://github.com/astoeckel/aequipedis/

Unmaintained at this point, but here's a Webpack loader that does this: https://github.com/technopagan/sqip

Roger Alsing (Johansson) did this in 2008:

https://rogerjohansson.blog/2008/12/07/genetic-programming-e...

Indeed. I mentioned that in the README: https://github.com/fogleman/primitive#inspiration

I did skim that file through but missed it, sorry. It's worth pointing out in the comments here in case others miss it.

The comparison is interesting since your rectangle version has superior image quality compared to Alsings. If I squint my eyes it is hard to tell a difference to the original picture. It looks blurred the "right way" somehow.

My thoughts exactly.

I'm struggling to find again a c++ implementation of this I saw on github a while back. Does HN the hive mind remember?

The core of Primitive is open source, written in Go.

https://github.com/fogleman/primitive

Only the UI is closed source. It's written in Objective-C and basically shells out to the Go code.

I was just poking through some of the code and noticed that there seem to a lot of open bugfix PRs [1]. Have you thought about going through and upstreaming some of them? Many of them seem like quick reviews.

Edit: Also, if you would like some help maintaining it, I imagine plenty of fellow HN-ers (including me) would love to help.

[1] https://github.com/fogleman/primitive/pulls?q=is%3Aopen+is%3...

I noticed the PRs too. Looks like one of the people submitting them has also been maintaining their own branch[1] with a bunch merged.

[1] https://github.com/bmaltais/primitive

And here is the original post by the author https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12539109

I modified this to try and compare against the last image it generated and feed it images via ffmpeg from a movie. Ultimately the results were still a little too choppy for video but the effect was very cool. The processing time was also incredibly long because lowering the polygon count made it very hard to tell what was moving.

Could you post a video clip of the output? It sounds like the effect from "A Scanner Darkly" perhaps -- loved that effect in that movie!

Almost a decade ago I remember using an online service called Vector Magic to do this kind of stuff. At that time it was considered the state-of-the-art auto tracer.

Is this noticeably better than Vector Magic when using Bezier curves?

I keep a windows xp VM around almost exclusively for Vector Magic. I've never tried it with photos though. Mostly for improving the quality of logos by vectorizing then exporting a higher-res PNG.

Maybe I will finally be able to get rid of it. I can't tell right now, I think Primitive is being hugged to death currently.

Vector magic runs perfectly fine and does a great job even in high Res photos on Win 10. About 90 seconds for 2048x1433 image with some intricate details at high quality setting (as compared to offered medium and low quality settings) with unlimited colours.

But results are still pretty nice even at low quality setting with limited colour palette. Hardly takes 15 secs.

Rediscovered, posted multiple times on HN.

Please build iOS version!