Re: First prototypes available

Hi Paul

The web service is just a proof of concept. I decided to do the prototype with a standalone image server but could just as well have made a Wordpress plugin.  The standard can be implemented in any piece of software. For a web context it makes sense to  put it on the server. It doesn’t have to be its own service. If the Wordpress Responsive Image plugin (which is now in core) supported the standard, then all Wordpress driven sites could potentially support it (for free).  

For web, you cannot get rid of the conversion step. But I think most of the cms websites already have some sort of thumbnailer built in so that the authors can upload a large image and it is scaled to a web friendly jpeg. 

I think a new file format just to solve one use case (art direction) is not going to happen. With a metadata standard we can use existing infrastructure: Common image formats and server side thumbnailers. You still need the <picture>-Tag in the browser to select the correct image size. This makes sense because images sent to the browser usually have no metadata embedded. 


For desktop applications, image viewers such as Irfan could support it as well and correctly display images in a responsive fashion. Maybe even Photos on iPhone. Or image viewers on embedded devices where devices with different screens are using the same operating system.


Regards

Simon


Am 14. Februar 2016 bei 18:10:31, Paul Deschamps (pdescham49@gmail.com) schrieb:

Hi Simon, 

This is all great stuff however are you suggesting that the planet use a server or rather a collection of servers to process imagery for responsive design?

There are a few considerations in this approach that I think need to be called out. 
Bandwidth costs
Infrastructure costs - setting up a world wide CDN
SLA on response times
Legal ramifications - if something 'happens' that is undesirable. 
IMHO what is needed here is an adoption of a responsive file format that some of the rules you've called out on for handling the cropping scaling of the raster; not a webservice. 

Though this may be a good model for a "commercial" product to handle a unique way to resolve some of the issues of responsive design. I don't feel it belongs in the W3C.

There is no way to offer this as a "free" service since the infrastructure costs would be quite something.

Just my two cents. 

Paul


 



On Sun, Feb 14, 2016 at 11:19 AM, Simon Bächler <b@chler.com> wrote:
Dear members

I spent the last few weeks creating prototype implementations of software that uses the XMP rmd draft standard. 

The results can be seen on this demo page:
http://sbaechler.github.io/universalimages-demo/

You can try out the image server yourself here:
http://thumbor.stellanera.com/unsafe/320x/filters:rmd()/http://stellanera.com/universalimages/monks.jpg. Just increase the image width to 360 or 480 and see the crop region adjust for the new width. You can also use your own images as a source.
The server is running on a EC2 micro instance and is not protected. Please don’t abuse it.

I had to make some small adjustments to the schema while developing the prototypes. But now I think it holds up pretty well.
The big advantage of using a XMP schema is that it is completely independent of the image format. 

The first tool is a Metadata UI Extension for Adobe products. It allows editing the responsive metadata by hand using the „File information“ dialog. It is available on Github under the universalimages organization: https://github.com/universalimages/rmd-extension.

The next tool is a Adobe Photoshop plugin for Photoshop CC that provides a graphical user interface for setting responsive metadata information. The package can be downloaded here: https://github.com/sbaechler/ps-rmd-plugin/releases.

In the newest version of Photoshop, Adobe stopped support for the Extension manager and requires that all plugins be installed via the Adobe Exchange cloud platform. I submitted the package and it is currently in review. I can give anyone who is interested a preview access. Just send me your email address (that has a creative cloud account) and I can add you to the testers group.

For cropping the images, I created a plugin for the Python based open-source image server Thumbor. The plugin currently only runs on a fork of Thumbor because it needs access to the XMP metadata. 
The repository is available here: https://github.com/sbaechler/thumbor-universalimages. I added a UML activity diagram to the repo that explains the cropping process. It got quite complex with all the rules and combinations of them. 


Best Regards

Simon