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@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@dunelm.org.uk, Wikimedia Commons Discussion List commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org
On 21/11/2007, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
On 21/11/2007, Brianna Laugher brianna.laugher@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@gmail.com)
_______________________________________________ Commons-l mailing list Commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l