On 10 Oct 2014, 12:31 pm, Joe Billings wrote:
ICC profiles were respected in a previous version of Showcase but some users reported ridiculous output file sizes (thumbnails in the megabytes IIRC), so we took the decision to remove them. We could certainly look into providing a way to toggle them on or off in the output, along with the other metadata.
Cheers,
Joe
Joe,
I’m really pleased you’re considering addressing this. Honestly, it’s so important.
There are two issues. 1/ Data integrity, in the form of accurately represented colour. 2/ Protection of intellectual property.
Colour :
The history of it all goes back to dial up modems, when every byte counted. The legacy behaviour of stripping everything possible from every element of a website, to counter the snail-speed dial up connection are long over and these days a few K here or there make little difference.
The size of an icc profile doesn’t really change according to the size of an image. So the cost of adding one to a tiny thumbnail, or an icon and the cost of adding one to a Retina Display sized jpeg is pretty much identical.
Here is a grab of the difference with and without an icc-profile on a 2048x1371 jpeg (5 KB) :
As for the cost in terms of size, for adding metadata, here is a similar comparison, with and without metadata (4KB) :
Intellectual Property :
Protection of intellectual property has become a huge issue for artists of all sorts since the arrival of the internet. Anonymous work just makes it harder and harder to control copyright abuse and theft. The Orphan Works initiatives are making it even more of an issue and for photographers, who are experiencing a sea-change in their industry, the last thing they need is people willy nilly helping themselves to their work, with nary a thought for the author.
Stripping metadata makes work anonymous and as such, should be actively discouraged. As software developers you guys already know how hard it is to fight to protect your intellectual property and to be properly paid for the work you’ve done. Pirating of software is your worst nightmare. Well … for photographers and other artists, it’s a similar battle. Deliberately stripping metadata only makes the job harder for us.
“We could certainly look into providing a way to toggle them on or off in the output, along with the other metadata.”
Clearly this is the absolute best of both worlds. But you know, I would bet that most people posting stuff on the internet, don’t even realise that there are already icc profiles in their images. … Take a screen-grab in MacOSX and you’ll find that you’re monitor’s profile is embedded in the image. Surprise!
Sure, we don’t need exif data which contains lots of useless camera info (in fact I strip this myself), but a few K for IPTC copyright, ownership info etc. is a small price to pay, for an essential service.
Also … regarding the simplicity of building galleries, the most useful metadata in this respect are ‘filename’ and ‘caption’ (sometimes called ‘description’). Having these retained is a HUGE timesaver. You will see Caption and the data that typically, I personally include in my images, in this grab :
(This is just the Info Panel in MacOSX Preview.app)
Hoping you can find some time to enable Exhibeo to retain this data …
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