On Tue, Jun 20, 2006 at 07:58:30PM +0200, Steve Bennett wrote:
All the other
changes could pretty simply be done without
decompressing the entire image. (We don't fully decompress jpegs for
resizing today, but we do PNGs.. which is why PNGs have tighter size
constraints.. people were running the servers out of ram with huge PNG
maps)... Rotation OTOH would be much harder to accomplish
incrementally.
Incrementally? I'll leave that one to the image manipulation specialists.
He's correct; if you want multiple rotations of an image, do them all
from the original.
How does
placing the subject dead center maximizes the encyclopedic
value of an image? Yes, perhaps you could see a few more hairs in
Depends what the subject is. But fairly evidently, the more stuff in
the thumbnail (and we are talking about the thumbnail that appears in
the article here - the full picture is still accessible) that is
relevant to the article, the better. Our thumbnails are already small,
like 200x150. If 100x150 of that is empty space caused by artistic
positioning, then we've lost a lot of possible informational content.
There are times and places for it - but small images that illustrate
an article are not them.
Correct. Pictures (can be for) art. Thumbnails are for *information*.
I, personally, am always quite favorably impressed when I click through
someone's thumbnail of a closeup of a person, and discover that it's a
full-sized picture, in which that face merely happens to appear. Good
choice in cropping the thumbnail appeals to my sense of aesthetics.
If we wrote
our text in some sort of compressed always machine
parsable English we could probably express more ideas in a given
number of words... but thats not what we do because the value to the
reader is increased through brilliant prose.
Your example is good - we *do* cut waffle, and we *do* cut all the
background discussion that you need to understand the article, or we
put it down the bottom of the article, out of the way. Our lead
paragraphs are idea-rich, information-dense text exactly comparable to
cropping and increasing contrast in our thumbnails. Your example of
"compressed always machine parsable English" might be comparable with
"overcropping" - taking the idea too far and losing context.
Very nice metaphor, yes.
I'm a big
advocate of socal soutions to social problems... but I'd
prefer that the technoligy not make things worse while we're trying to
figure things out. :) Perhaps that would happen, perhaps it wouldn't..
I'm not sure.
Just remember that Wikipedia couldn't possibly work.
Hee.
I don't
know how to solve it... We have very few real photographers
participating... a majority of our photo involved folks are primarly
finding free images on the web, or just skimming their snapshot
collections, so the culture of image alteration is very different from
what it would be if more people were photographers.
And better image manipulation tools would discourage real photographers?
And, remember, folks, since I think we've taken our eyes off the prize;
the original discussion here, AIUI, was "knobs that can be applied to a
thumbnail".
Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth jra(a)baylink.com
Designer Baylink RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates The Things I Think '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA
http://baylink.pitas.com +1 727 647 1274
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
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