Perceptual Hashing Turns a Cluttered Camera Roll into Accidental 3D Wigglegrams

A wigglegram is a faux-stereoscopic image built by looping near-identical frames shot from slightly different angles into a GIF. The author, an indecisive photographer who fires off multiple takes of every scene and never deletes anything, realized their camera roll was unintentionally full of the raw material for these — burst-like clusters of the same subject from shifting viewpoints.

Rather than hunt through years of photos manually, they applied perceptual hashing, the same technique reverse-image-search engines like TinEye use. Unlike a cryptographic hash such as SHA-1, a perceptual hash produces similar bit patterns for visually similar images, so computing the Hamming distance between hashes and setting a threshold surfaces runs of near-duplicate shots. A script hashes the library, finds close pairs, and extracts them automatically — the slow part being pulling originals down from iCloud, not the hashing itself.

The result was hundreds of recovered wigglegrams, most genuinely accidental and often reading more like short kinescopic clips than crisp stereo images, with animals, design work, and sculpture making good subjects. The tool is published on GitHub and works against an iCloud photo library on macOS or any local directory of images.