Hi all,
First, thanks for the good wishes and thoughts while I've been away. I'm back now and turning my mind to the future of this site again. What I'd like to do now is to make a start at fleshing out the specs for the new facilities that we want to off. Remeber the general aim is to provide best-in-class facilities specifically for the photographic community. Mostly photographic web sites just work like any other sites, and maybe with respect to features such as image presentation and gallery management our community would like something better. So here are some initial thoughts on image presentation:
Requirements for a new image display system.
On DPReview there is a member called Detail Man who will sometimes comment on the several problems with the image display system there. Many people do not find problems, but within the community of photographers there are those that think that displayed image quality on galleries and photographic sites should match the standards that they aim for with presentation of their own pictures. It’s a reasonable ask that if a photographer takes the care to work in an extended colour space such as Adobe RGB or ProPhotoRGB that they think that will be reflected in their output and would like it displayed to a viewer, where the viewer has the equipment to support it. Likewise, if you’ve used a high resolution camera and taken care with technique to translate that resolution to the image, it would be good if people with high resolution viewing facilities could see the image as you intended. With respect to both concerns it should be the image display system that takes care of this, and re-rendering to suit those that don’t have the facilities rather than the photographer.
Resolution management
Considerations are:
- Handling high resolutions. The display system should serve full 4k images for those that have them and wish to view images full-screen. At the same time, it is not sensible to download a full 4k image to a phone for casual viewing. Therefore the server-side system should be capable of sending a suitably sized image to the browser depending on the host and user options.
- Resampling. Poor resampling can make a real mess of an image. Therefore the image display system should use good resampling algorithms both server-side and client side, rather than relying on those provided by the browser or host OS (which are generally poor).
Colour management
There is a rule of thumb ‘use sRGB for the web’, but most browsers can handle Adobe or ProPhoto RGB. Some browsers also handle monitor colour profiles, and in that case it would be desirable for the viewer to see the image properly managed for the device being used. It would be a considerable convenience for photographers to be able to share images with colour as they intended, and without doing a colour space conversion just in order to post. Therefore the image system should preserve and serve embedded colour profiles. More can be done. If an image is served in a colour profile which the browser cannot handle the colour translation made at the client side cannot be relied on, or may simply not be done at all, resulting in a miscoloured image. Therefore the client-side system should determine the browser capabilities and the server side (or client side, if the proves to be more sensible) system should perform an appropriate colour space conversion if the image is in a space not supported by the browser.
Image formats
Now that formats such as HEIC are being used in addition to JPEG, the system should be able to deal with them - including serving as JPEG is the client side device and browser cannot handle them.
User control
It should be possible for the viewing user to view the image as required without downloading the image file. Some systems insist that the whole image is downloaded if a high quality presentation is required. The system should allow zooming and windowing on the image, with good quality rescaling in the client-side software, up to full 100% view. Many images will be presented small, embedded in a post or article. The image system should allow zooming and windowing in place, or using a modal pop-up (with full-screen ‘clean’ display capability) to allow viewing the image without changing the context of the document in which it was originally embedded.
Gallery facilities.
The image display system should be integrated with a user gallery system. The gallery system essentially allows a user to organise and curate their content. Features as follows:
1. All images uploaded by a user will be contained in their gallery.
2. Images uploaded while posting in forums or within an article will be uploaded to the gallery and linked (and displayed) in the post or article.
3. Images already loaded to the gallery may be directly included (linked and displayed) within posts and articles.
4. The link is to a location in the gallery rather than directly to the file. The image file contained may be later updated or edited, if the user decides on a new version.
5. Photographers are generally serious about copyright issues. Therefore the gallery system should ensure that appropriate copyright notices are inserted into the EXIF of an image either when stored or when served. Existing copyright data should be preserved. If there is none either a default notice identifying the username and site or a notice selected by the user should be added.
6. The gallery system should allow external browsing of a user’s gallery. The user will have the option to mark some images as not for public viewing or not for viewing in the gallery (for instance, images from posts).
7. The gallery system should allow the user to provide alternative views - for instance organise images (non-exclusively) into albums or selected by tag.
8. There should be a collaborative gallery, which may link images from different users (with their agreement) into a common gallery view, for use in contests, themed discussions or so on.
9. This feature could be a way of presenting themed photograph threads.
Anyhow, just thoughts for discussion. Comments, suggestions etc very welcome.
