Presenting LF photos in Internet. How?

[Martin D.]

LF photography is largely unknown to the public. To show a LF photo in Internet would require to upload at least a 50-100 MB file, if some jpeg compression is applied. Many just upload a small jpeg, maybe up to 1000pix in width. Is there a better way than this?

1. I just started to include some "photo details" for most of the photos on my web page. The advantage is that the resulting jpeg is small and it is my choice which part(s) of the image get included. Examples: example 1, example 2. The disadvantage is that many or at least some people do not realize that the photo details are not standalone photos, but details from a master photo. Many also do not realize, what they see is not 1:1, but a notably downsampled portion of a photo.

2. It is possible to use a Flash driven tool such as Zoomify. It allows to zoom in a photo, possibly giving someone a chance to download the whole file. I am sure that this problem can be easily circumvented in order to allow the zooming only for selected parts of the photos.

3. Custom Flash solution. A few days of my life invested in Adobe Flash and I have something that I can use. I was contemplating a Flash movie, in which the complete photo is shown, and then the camera travels across the photo at somewhat increased (possibly variable) zoom factor. This would probably be somewhat bandwidth consuming and, in general, I would prefer, my web site stays Flash-free.

Any other options? I do not see a direct link between the fancyness of web presentations and photos sold (also because monitor calibration is not widely applied). My web serves (currently) as a reference to people that saw the actual prints. Nevertheless, it would be nice to accentuate the technical and other qualities of LF photography. E.g. my photos were often designed to show several concurrently evolving events, showing a degree of dependance that I would like to emphasize. I realize that a bit more textual description would help clarify things, but still, a good visual presentation is worth a thousand words.

For those who do not understand the question: How to effeciently show a LF photo that when shown in 600pix width is hard to view because people in it got reduced to a few pixels. And at the same time to avoid uploading a larger file that could get "borrowed" by someone else. Any ideas?

[Charles Carstensen]

Hi, Martin. size your scanned photo to 72 ppi and anywhere near 1000 px longest dimension. No concern about whether the original is LF or not. Be advised EVERYTHING you publish to the internet is already borrowed on the viewer/reader computer. There is no way to prevent or safeguard that. Therefore, only publish low resolution (72 ppi) images. You will soon get the hang of web preparation that will look tack sharp and pretty close to your print. There is nothing like viewing a print.

[Ole Tjugen]

"Downloading" a complete high-res image made with Zoomify would take a very long time - you would have to zoom in to maximum resolution, screen capture, move the rectangle, screen capture, move...

And then stitch it all together, of course. I believe most potential "image thieves" would give up rather quickly.

You're welcome to try it - http://www.bruraholo.no/images/Lodalen.html

[Martin D.]

Ole, is this is a challenge?

I dont like Zoomify because it shows the whole picture, not only because it can potentially get stolen, but also because it does not direct the viewer.

[Ole Tjugen]

Martin, I like your way of presenting selected bits of the whole in more detail.

In my case there are few bits that are more interesting than others - the picture shows no people or even man-made structures! I have some "favorite frames" which would make good pictures in their own right though, and have thought of presenting some of them as "alternative views".
The whole is presented elsewhere, but that only shows the whole and not the level of detail. The Zoomify view is the full 1000dpi scan from a 13x18cm slide (I'll have to check that on my own computer), and would take ages to download and stitch.

[Lucas M]

Nice scan Ole. I like it.

[Richard M. Coda]

Reminds me of "Blow Up".

[Matt Blaze]

There is, for all practical (and theoretical) purposes, no effective way to prevent people from keeping bits that you send them. Period. This is a rare instance of theory and practice being the same.

I'm not sure, in any case, what it even means to want to present the image on the Internet but prevent people from "stealing" it. By preventing stealing, do you mean preventing uses other than your original presentation? Use without attribution? Something else?

Perhaps you're a commercial photographer and you want to sell digital or print copies of your work to consumers or stock photo users, but want to promote it on the Web. Or maybe you're an amateur, but can't stand the idea of someone getting copies of your work without crediting you.

Presumably you want to show off the full resolution of your photos.

I can think of several options:

1 - Just bite the bullet and rely on non-technical protections. (This is the option I favor for most of my own photos). Make whatever resolution you want available on the web and include contact information in the image (e.g., in exif data or in a small and unobtrusive text outside the image border). Honest people will find you. Dishonest people won't. Live with it, and hope that the benefit of wide distribution of high quality photos will make you richer and more famous that you would be had you employed more restrictive (and ineffective) protections that prevent people from seeing your pictures in all their respective glory.

2 - Damage your web photos. Use big obtrusive watermarks. Realize that these are generally easy for a determined adversary to remove and make your photo look like crap to your potential customers and fans.

3 - Technical solutions like Zoomify. If all the bits of the image are available, they can be put together. They also prevent people with platforms you didn't anticipate from enjoying your photos.

4 - Low-res and selective high res. Make a low-resolution version of your image available, with links to full resolution crops of selected areas. This lets you show people what the overall image looks like, show off how good it looks at full resolution, but doesn't expose all of the bits of the full resolution image. This may be a good compromise for the paranoid, and you encode the links to the crops as hot areas of the image in html or javascript if you want to get fancy. I believe this is basically Ole's approach, if I understand it correctly.

But option 1 is probably better than you think, depending on your business.

[Ed Richards]

Did a Zoomify test with an 8k x 6k image. It gets chopped into 1000 small bits. On a 10K wide image, it is 2000+. Pretty difficult to put back together, but not theorically impossible, and it might be possible to automate it. Still, I doubt it is a huge risk.

[Matt Blaze]

Did a Zoomify test with an 8k x 6k image. It gets chopped into 1000 small bits. On a 10K wide image, it is 2000+. Pretty difficult to put back together, but not theorically impossible, and it might be possible to automate it. Still, I doubt it is a huge risk.

That should be easy to automate. And once automated, it requires no skill or effort to reconstruct any given image. It seems extremely foolish to depend on such a mechanism for any serious security purpose. (This is not to say Zoomify has no valid purpose -- it seems to be a reasonable, if somewhat technologically fragile and client-specific, way to provide arbitrary resolution images on the web).