The Adobe DNG (digital negative, i.e. portable raw) format seems to
pass free-content muster at a first glance.
The question then is being able to upload the things at all. How
technically necessary is the 20MB limit? If we upped it to 40MB, or
100MB, would the servers melt? What are the practical issues from the
view of the system administrators?
- d.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Oldak Quill <oldakquill(a)gmail.com>
Date: 21 Nov 2007 15:02
Subject: Re: [Commons-l] Allow Digital Negative (DNG) RAW format on
Commons? (and increase filesize limit)
To: andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk, Wikimedia Commons Discussion List
<commons-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
On 21/11/2007, Andrew Gray <shimgray(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 21/11/2007, Brianna Laugher
<brianna.laugher(a)gmail.com> wrote:
"There are indeed, some amazing images. I
definitely believe that
publishers could use this resource if they're in need of (one more
image) to complete an existing project. But I'm uncertain about how
publishable much of the content is, especially in the absence of
higher resolution files (which disqualifies printing). "
So although our works are usually sufficient for web use, it seems
clear that we cannot present ourselves as a serious kind of archivist,
culture-recording project, without introducing a RAW format and
encouraging people to use it.
Careful not to jump two steps there :-)
We mainly don't have higher resolution image files because people
aren't uploading high-resolution image files to start with, not
because the high-resolution JPGs or TIFFs which we have Just Aren't
Good Enough(TM).
And people aren't uploading high-resolution image files because they
can't. If the upload limit were increased, there are plenty of US-govt
TIFFs that could be added to Commons and greatly improve our
usability.
The 20MB upload limit has come up a fair few times on these mailing
lists and the only objections I remember relate to whether we have the
resources to handle larger files. Tell me if I'm wrong, but I can't
see any problems in doubling our upload limit to 40MB straight away to
enable more/better quality image and sound files to be uploaded. We
should further discuss and investigate the impact of raising the limit
further so we can start storing reasonable film formats and files (I,
personally, cannot wait until the limit is high enough to allow us to
provide reasonable quality early silent films).
Ideally, the upload limit will eventually be high enough to allow us
to provide lossless data files (with classical music movements of up
to ~20MB, this would need to be up to 100 MB lossless music in FLAC
format). The feasibility of serving 100MB files over HTTP still needs
to be discussed, but I can't see how a 40MB limit would cause us any
problems or cost us significant resources.
--
Oldak Quill (oldakquill(a)gmail.com)
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