On 8/13/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote:
For example, someone decided that a 3/4 view of a
camera wasn't as
good as a full front view. They twisted the image electronically to
make it look kinda like a frontal view, but this left part of the
camera body missing. So they painted it in. I'd take less issue with
the fact that their paintjob looked poor were it not for the fact that
they got the shape of the camera body quite wrong. :( So the
EnWikipedia (at least) article had a inaccurate hack job of an image
for a few weeks for that particular camera before I noticed it and
reverted the image on commons. :(
Yeah. Sounds like a good-faith edit that went horribly wrong.
Compared to that I'm not too worried about
brightness/color/cropping..
etc.. but I think that using an external site for this is completely
wrong. Dynamic crops should be a native feature of our repository,
you should be able to upload a single image then define alternative
views which are on the fly generated crops. Other really simple
alterations (like most of the ones offered by that site) could be
offered this way.
We've discussed this in the past, but it's a fair bit of work, and
nothing came of it. I'm not sure if a formal proposal was made
anywhere, but there were discussions to allow attributes, like
[[image:foo.jpg|cropx=15,150|brightness=+3]]. Obviously that would
have readability problems.
It looks like you're suggesting having a dynamic view on another
image, though, something like: [[Image:foo2.jpg]] which contains text
like #IMAGEVIEW [[Image:foo.jpg]] with other tags indicating what
kinds of tweaks to apply.
That could be good too. I don't think the two proposals are mutually
exclusive. Could I also suggest making it easy to display a particular
revision of an image. Then you would never be affected by someone else
editing the image later on.
I played with the site (on a friends computer, it
requires flash), the
interface is snazzy no doubt, but all the manipulations it offers save
red-eye are things that Imagemagic could provide... I could pretty
easily setup a basic ajax interface that offered those filters and let
you tweak their settings in real time.
Mmmmm...but why? There's an awesome interface that would do everything
we want. Why code from scratch a "basic...interface"?
Steve