On 8/13/07, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@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