A Proof of Concept [via Universal Images Community Group]

This is a followup to the previous post that suggested using a metadata standard
to define the rules for art direction. The advantage of this approach is that it
is independent of image formats and operating systems and can be used with
existing technology. The downside of it is that its scope does not include the
browser. It needs a program on the server that processes the image before
delivering it. Since most web frameworks use some kind of thumbnailer, this
should not be a big issue.

Although the metadata standard has been developed with the web as its primary
use case, there are other areas where it could be used as well. I am thinking of
desktop image viewers, digital billboards or embedded devices. Everywhere you
need to show a full screen image but don't know the shape of the screen it is
viewed on.



I have created two pieces of software that use the metadata standard. The first
is a plugin for Adobe Photoshop and an extension for the file info dialog that
lets users add responsive information to any image. The second is a filter for
a web service that interprets the standard and crops an image according to the
rules if there is a need for it.

The results of such a workflow can be seen on the demo page.

I chose to create a filter for the Thumbor image server because I know Python
better than PHP. Otherwise, I would have built a plugin for Wordpress. The
ultimate goal is that in the future most programming languages and web
frameworks have a library that can read and process that metadata.

I would have preferred to have a plugin for Adobe Lightroom instead of Photoshop
but this turned out to be rather difficult. I think it is not possible to access
the image canvas from within the context of a plugin. Another option would have
been a web interface but there is the issue of not being able to save a file to
disk.

The processing of the responsive metadata turned out to be a fairly complex
process. I drew an activity diagram to help figure out the decisions that have
to be made when applying the art direction rules to the image.



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'A Proof of Concept'

https://www.w3.org/community/universalimages/2016/02/27/a-proof-of-concept/



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Received on Saturday, 27 February 2016 13:54:11 UTC