There is a new tool called PicNik that allows on-web touching up of
photos: all basic tools like contrast, cropping, sharpness, conversion
to greyscale etc. This is something that Wikipedia in particular has
really been lacking: an easy way to improve the quality of a lot of
the fairly tacky travel happy snaps that get uploaded. It's definitely
not free software, but a lot of the uses of it are free. They don't
host your images: you upload an image, work on it for a bit, then
download it again. They have integration with facebook, flickr and a
few other sites.
So I asked them about MediaWiki integration. There are apparently two
ways we can achive this: either we extend MediaWiki to make use of
their API, or we implement an API directly to allow them to retrieve
an image (obviously pretty simple), then upload the updated version
(credit and authentication issues). Could someone give me an idea of
how much work would be involved? I might be interested in attempting
some of the coding, especially if someone else is interested and can
give me some guidance.
We have an API that any third-party site can use to
pass a photo over
to Picnik for editing and when the user is done editing Picnik
saves
the result back to the site. It looks like MediaWiki has an extension
mechanism, maybe that would be a good place to start.
How could we do this? Extend the image page to have a link to Picnik,
then provide a mechanism whereby Picnik can call MediaWiki with a
certain URL. Picnik seems pretty flexible on this point. The URL for
info about the API is as follows:
http://www.picnik.com/info/api
We can also add "integration bridges" to
Picnik. Integration bridges
use a third-party API to access the photos on that site.
The pages in
Picnik that show thumbnails from Flickr and Picasa Web and can save to
them are examples of integration bridges. Does MediaWiki have an API
for accessing the photo content stored in a wiki, and updating it?
I don't know the answer to that question. Obviously it's easy to
retrieve the content of one image, but allowing higher level (bulk)
manipulation and organisation of images would be pretty cool if that
was possible. Also, are there any other ways of getting an image back
into MediaWiki besides special:upload ?
Any other comments about this idea are very welcome. Particularly if
there are any objections to linking to such a site. I really think the
potential benefits are very significant, so hopefully those objections
can be overcome.
Steve