Case study
Camagru
Webcam photo booth with stickers and a public gallery, hand-rolled in PHP
A 42/1337 photo booth web app: capture a webcam shot or upload one, layer on sticker overlays composited server-side, then publish it to a public gallery the whole community can like and comment on. No framework, no Composer packages — every line of PHP, the image compositing, and the auth layer built by hand.
The problem: 42/1337's Camagru subject requires a full photo-sharing app — capture, image processing, accounts, a public feed — with no framework or third-party packages allowed, just raw PHP and its standard library.
The solution: Hand-written PHP with PDO prepared statements handles auth (JWT + bcrypt) and a paginated gallery, while the GD extension does the pixel-level sticker compositing on a 512×512 canvas — the whole stack (PHP, frontend, database) ships in Docker.
The landing page states the brief plainly: turn a webcam into a sticker photo booth and publish straight to a shared gallery — framed as the 42/1337 school project it is.
Every capture lands in a public, paginated gallery with like and comment counts — the social layer that turns a solo photo-booth exercise into a shared feed, consistent across desktop and mobile.
The constraint that shapes everything: no framework, no Composer packages. Sticker overlays are alpha-blended server-side with GD on a 512×512 canvas, auth runs on JWT and bcrypt, and the whole stack ships in Docker.
Mobile carries the same hero copy and the same gallery, sign-in prompt included — nothing about the photo-sharing flow is desktop-only.
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