On 6/19/06, Steve Bennett <stevage(a)gmail.com> wrote: [snip] Unfortunately the appreciate amount of sharpening is highly content dependant (and to some extent a matter of taste). I have absolutely zero hope of a single always on sharping setting giving better results overall than none at all... I do hope that a small number of user specified settings (none,low,high) would suffice. If someone is aware of any papers on automagically selecting appropriate sharpening, I'd love to hear about it. ... but this is just getting off topic. I'm glad to hear that other people think such features would be useful.

Jay R. Ashworth wrote: Apropos of the thumbnailing issue, it might actually be a huge advantage to be able to crop and zoom. Consider the case where we have a historical photograph showing several notable people. We have the option of simply showing the same image against each of those people, or uploading multiple cropped fragments showing each person in turn. Imagine the possibilities of uploading a single image showing all those people and then being able to show just the appropriate face in the article, linking through to the main image for context. HTH HAND -- Phil -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Thumbnail-params%2C-Was%3A--Image-uploads-now-undelet… Sent from the Wikipedia Developers forum at Nabble.com.

On 6/20/06, Steve Bennett <stevage(a)gmail.com> wrote: That thought of this makes me uncomfortable. Many people have uncalibrated monitors and weird tastes in brightness and contrast, it's hard to be objective about such changes.. please see the miniessay on the last bullet of my commons userpage (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Gmaxwell). Such knobs would also encourage shed painting and create an unneccessary proliferation of additional versions. I don't think this can be done without loading the entire uncompressed image into memory which pretty much makes it a non-starter. [snip] It doesn't always play out so rosey... Sometimes someone spends hours getting a photograph just right (because unlike wikitext, even in the best case 98% of the work must be done by a single photographer) and they are proud of their work. Then along comes a self appointed wiki-photo expert... who goofs up the image to fit his tastes on his uncalibrated display and insists that it's better. Perhaps the new version is more contrasty, with over pumped saturation and sharpness.... At first glance it's more eye catching, so other passers by support the changed version, but it's lost it's depth, lost detail in the shadow, or just lost it's ability to captivate for more than a moment. Perhaps it's cropped to place the subject dead center, destroying the careful balence achieved in the photo which guides the eye... We've had photographers leave in digust over this. Wikinews permits unfree images (CC-BY-ND) as a result of this. So I'm a bit hesitant to suggest we provided technical tools which may encourage bad aspects of our behavior. But this has gone wayyyy off-topic now. :) Once someone impliments some of this stuff we can debate the merits of turning it on.

On 6/20/06, Steve Bennett <stevage(a)gmail.com> wrote: The work curve today discourages casual modification.. it's both good and bad. If I spend four hours preparing an image, I'd feel better if the next person in line spend more than four seconds considering his changes. :) It's hyperlinked! Follow the link. Extra parameters in [[Image:]] create scaling problems. If we have a million images, then we'll have at a minimum of around a million thumbs. If people tend to use two sizes, two million thumbs. If they tend ti have two different rotations four million thumbs. It's not so much a disk space issue as it is an ability for the operating system and other software to scale to handling tens of millions of small files. It can be permitted, of course, if the feature is important enough... the whole reason I started this thread was to remind the folks working on the next gen system (Brion :) ) that there is a justified need for some additional parameters beyond image width. What features those are, I'm not sure.. I made a few examples that I would support. Settings one per image avoid the issue... Would you actually have multiple rotations though? If not, and you were indeed making a correction you overwrite the original. 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. Fair enough... although the shed painting is sometimes the worst on Featured Pictures... Most people don't care to correct your happy snapshots. It's cost us good photographers. Wikipedia isn't overrun by goons, but we're desperately short of real photographers. No, we're trying to be tasteful, professional, and most of all informative. If we were just trying to push people's attention buttons we could make all the images flash, and make the text red on yellow. How does placing the subject dead center maximizes the encyclopedic value of an image? Yes, perhaps you could see a few more hairs in someones eyebrow with a tighter composition, but if someone needs to see that they can click for the full screen version... Worse, by overcropping you distort perspective and create an unnatural balance which is potentially distracting. 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. And they are reminded that it's a collaborative project not an exclusive photo publishing ground (unless we're talking about wikinews)... And, of course, thats quite right. A balance is required, and far too often people simple change without asking. 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. 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. On solution (as seen on Wikinews) was to compromise the Wikimedia foundation's goal of distributing free content... I'd hate to see that same compromise appear elsewhere. Well, it's off-topic until someone codes it... :) I think that everything you suggested would be desirable features in *MediaWiki* if not on the wikimedia wikis, someone should probably solve them for the zillions of small wikis out there that could use them, and then we can debate if the solutions are suitable (technically and socially) for use on the wikimedia wikis.

On Tue, Jun 20, 2006 at 07:58:30PM +0200, Steve Bennett wrote: He's correct; if you want multiple rotations of an image, do them all from the original. 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. Very nice metaphor, yes. Hee. 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. Q: What is the most annoying thing on Usenet and in e-mail?

wha....?!?!?!! I can't believe it! How disappointing. According to http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Image_use_policy they also allow NC images! Is that not the very definition of nonfreeness for Wikimedia... is it really that they allow these because of photography quality concerns, or something else? FWIW I agree on the point of image-editing. I think the best approach is, when the original uploader is offended at "improvements" to an image, revert to their version and upload the edited version as a separate file. Then the community can argue about which they prefer and the original uploader doesn't feel their work is being "mauled" (even if everyone else has incredible bad taste). Brianna

On 6/20/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote: Where is all this coming from? Wikipedia is a collaborative project. Take a look at WP:FPC on en, and you will see that almost every user-submitted image gets one or more edits applied to it to boost its quality, then we vote on our favourite. Generally, this collaborative image-manipulation process works quite well. If there are some photographers who prefer not to take part in that, that's fine, and I'm sure people would respect their requests if they were made clearly on their image pages. This really is an abnormal scenario though. Steve

On 6/20/06, Craig Spurrier <craig(a)craigweb.net> wrote: The same is not true for ND images.

On 6/20/06, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher(a)gmail.com> wrote: generated thumbnail: smaller file size (lower quality JPEG compression) produces fuzzier images. This is closely related to the basic divide that exists: Camp A: Thumbnails exist only to be clicked on, to show the real image related to the page Camp B: Thumbnails are a fundamental part of the layout of the page, and should be made as big and pretty as necessary to achieve a pleasing and effective page design. Those in camp A tend to believe that thumbnails should have a small file size (15kb maximum), should not have a size imposed on them (respect users' preferences), and should probably be all laid out in a vertical column. Those in camp B tend to believe that thumbnails should have larger file sizes (30-50kb), should be resized as necessary, and should definitely not be laid in a vertical column. Camp B here. Steve

On 6/19/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote: In that case, it sounds like the relevant parameter should also be stored on the image, rather than on the call to the image. It seems unlikely to me that one would want to downscale using one method on one page, and using a different method on another page. In extreme cases (like, wanting to demonstrate pixelation), people can use the current fallback method. Steve

On 6/19/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote: Yes, but with caution - one of the main uses of cropping would probably be cutting faces out of CD covers and stuff, in violation of fair use. What might be nice: defining a default "thumbnail" for an image, with cropping and sharpening parameters, say. Then, if a user specifies just [[image:image|thumb]], that's what gets used. Taking it further, if a user specifies [[image:image|thumb:200px]] and there exists a thumbnail profile for 200px, *those* parameters could be used. Dunno how much it would all be used, of course. Steve

On Mon, Jun 19, 2006 at 02:37:02PM -0400, Gregory Maxwell wrote: Specifically, the amount of sharpening one might want is proportional to both the original *and* the cropped size of the image. 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. Q: What is the most annoying thing on Usenet and in e-mail?