I spent some time this week thinking and talking to Claude about how syncing photo transitions with tempo of the music can work.

This was related to a product idea that a colleague had, where non-technical people could upload a few photos to an app, choose a music, and get a video collage the likes of which you sometime get from Google photos, Apple’s photos app, and perhaps iMovie. The app intelligently sync photo transitions to the beat.

The problem may sound quite difficult at the outset and I didn’t find any good articles solving this particular thing. But in theory, at least according to Claude, a crude version of it should be doable.

Put simply, you find out BPM (beats per minute) of your selected music/audio file. This BPM, translated to beats per second, then serves as the base to transition a photo by.

So instead of setting a rule where an image stays on for, for instance 4s; you set it to happen after 8 beats. Meaning with a music having 120BPM, the image stays on for 4 secs, and for a 160BPM one, for 2.99 secs.

Very crude, and maybe it is just the Gel-mann amnesia effect and definitely subject to actual experimentation. But interesting nonetheless.

I will report more on this in the future.

Interesting reads

1. https://blog.ezyang.com/2025/12/code-review-as-human-alignment-in-the-era-of-llms/
   I wholeheartedly agree. In my view, the person submitting AI generated code for review should act like a conductor at an orchestra. They should understand and approve the high level plan before requesting another conductor (a human) for their time.

2. There's an Actual Reason You Can't Recycle Plastic
   I found this incredibly informative, with two of my favourite Youtubers.

3. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/01/so-youve-hit-age-gate-what-now
   Reading how different social media companies “estimate” your age was, let’s say, interesting.

A project I discovered

Your AI assistant searches code but doesn't understand it. ChunkHound researches your codebase—extracting architecture, patterns, and institutional knowledge at any scale.

GitHub - chunkhound/chunkhound: Local first codebase intelligence

Local first codebase intelligence. Contribute to chunkhound/chunkhound development by creating an account on GitHub.

A photo I took

Thank you for reading. See you next week!