How It All Began

Like all good stories, Bambi-Editor started out accidentaly. There were no plans or great ideas, just a friendship.

It's 2008/9 ...

A good friend of mine who runs a small local business in Milwaukee, WI needed a low cost, easy to use, and platform independent image uploader for his PHP site. He wanted ability for end users to easily upload properly cropped & scaled profile and avatar images. Back then jCrop was not an option so I wrote a small Java applet to do the job.

Early begninnings.... Before it was called Bambi-Editor.

Original Applet

Had there been a free customizable solution, Bambi-Editor would probably have never come to an existence. He didn't pay me for every hour of development (took about 100 hours to initially write it), so I licensed him binaries and retained ownership of code. I kept going back to it enhancing at night just for the fun of it. Years later I realized it's matured to the point others could find it useful. Late in 2012 Bambi-Editor already did so much more then anything similar out there, and whatever small competition Bambi had, focused only on cropping & uploading. In Spring of 2013 I finally felt it's good enough to go open source and released it under GPL on Source Forge.

Why Bambi Name?

From early days of development, there was one special photo I used to test and debug Bambi code - more than any other. I analyzed that

Sarah and I at the 2009 Bristol Rennaisance Fair

photo for so many hours, I feel like I know every single pixel in it! I picked it because of its rich saturation and wide spectrum of naturally distributed RGB values. Once I had it setup in the project I never thought twice about it. In any case, that photo features me (mrazjava) and my eldest daughter Sarah aka "Sarenka" who inspired the "Bambi" name ...

It's all about Sarenka

I'm Polish, living in the US. Shortly after Sarah's birth, my sister coined a nick name "Sarenka" which has stuck with her ever since. We call her Sarenka because phonetically it's close to Sarah. It is a Polish word for "fawn", so if you search Sarenka you get bunch of baby deer references, and a Polish to English translation. But calling this software SarenkaEditor or FawnEditor seemed silly. Then, one day she watched Bambi and the light bulb went on! Since that day, the project was called "Bambi-Editor".