[HN Gopher] Generating more interesting image previews using ima...
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Generating more interesting image previews using imagemagick
Author : rognjen
Score : 112 points
Date : 2021-05-05 08:04 UTC (2 days ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (ognjen.io)
| asiachick wrote:
| I used puppeteer (headless chrome) to generate image previews.
| Can use the Canvas API and/or WebGL1 and WebGL2. Can also auto-
| add titles etc... You could even overlay HTML styled with CSS (vs
| drawing text with the Canvas API) and use the Puppeteer API to
| take a screenshot instead of using the canvas API to capture the
| canvas.
| devmunchies wrote:
| don't need all of headless chrome to use the canvas. can just
| use node-canvas.
|
| https://github.com/Automattic/node-canvas
| simion314 wrote:
| Why a blurred image do better then a low resolution or
| watermarked img ? I only seen this blurred stuff with dating
| sites where they send you some blurred img of someone that "is
| interested" , in this case I see maybe some way where the blur is
| trick to make you wonder what is under the blur, let me know if
| there are other uses that I can't think of.
| randcraw wrote:
| I agree, a 4x or 16x downsampled version seems like the obvious
| way to quickly denature an image without bias. The algorithm is
| trivial to implement and will run insanely fast. And the
| smaller amount of data has the added bonus of loading faster
| too.
| bredren wrote:
| Having bought image assets in the past, I agree these these ideas
| would not make it easier to decide whether to license something.
|
| Sometimes I've taken design drafts very far along, including
| manually removing the watermark, to see a full, if lower res,
| composite before deciding to license imagery for a final work.
|
| That said there is some useful examples of working with
| imagemagic here and it does deliver on "more interesting image
| previews."
| blunte wrote:
| (removed because I posted this on the wrong article comment
| section!)
| SamBam wrote:
| I'm confused, because not only is the article not in "dark
| mode" in any way (it has a bright white background) but it's
| css doesn't even seem to include a dark-mode version, so I
| don't know what you're seeing.
| blunte wrote:
| Crap. I clicked the wrong comment link. My bad! I'll remove
| my post.
| hans-moleman wrote:
| Anyone that buys art assets online will tell you this is a bad
| idea. You're obscuring the subject of the image and changing the
| feel of the picture. Watermarks and low res previews make sense
| because they will just make the image look worse while still
| being 100% recognizable. In his examples I cannot tell anymore
| that it's an image of two men fighting.. so why would I buy that
| picture if I can't tell what I'm looking at?
| Groxx wrote:
| If tied with a "make a paid account to access the obscured
| images", the non-obscured images may be useful enough on their
| own to be worth the initial buy-in. And the obscuring makes for
| a pretty strong block on use without at least _some_ payment,
| as it 's far harder to remove than most watermarks.
|
| I do agree that a watermark is (strongly) preferable for
| choosing which individual images to buy - small details can
| make or break images, and this obscures a _lot_ of the image.
| Just pointing out that there may be uses on the same kinds of
| sites.
| ______- wrote:
| > You're obscuring the subject of the image and changing the
| feel of the picture
|
| For those who have turned meme-creating into a sport,
| watermarks and other attributable data are vital in seeing how
| that meme spreads. I know people that deliberately put a yellow
| 1px border beneath each image they share (and created) so that
| if they spot it somewhere else, both they and others can guess
| where it originated. There are other more sophisticated methods
| which I can't mention here for detecting meme spread, but
| watermarks are a big deal in the meme world.
| nolok wrote:
| > There are other more sophisticated methods which I can't
| mention here
|
| I found that very funny in a austin power kind of way, like
| this is some sort of giant secret technology.
|
| The most efficient methods of watermarking pictures in ways
| that are easy to detect, easy to hide for the viewer yet hard
| to remove for the copier are all well known and detailed on
| the internet, in fact wikipedia is a decent source before
| going into more technical content.
|
| And in terms of "memes", this sort of watermark is most often
| done by individual users for reasons related to ego rather
| that copyright protection. Because the actual money making
| memes oriented websites will prefer the good old heavy duty
| watermark all over the picture, since it will be copied
| anyway they figure they might as well ensure the final viewer
| knows where it came from so he can look for it and get them
| new traffic.
| dylan604 wrote:
| "more interesting" is definitely a term of opinion. I'd agree I
| don't see these as useful for anything that I can imagine, but
| if we limited things others can do to "what I can imagine" the
| world would be a semi-dull place.
| lupire wrote:
| It's an interesting case of "here's my idea for a product I
| didn't launch" ia likely inferior to an idea that passed
| customer acceptance testing.
| rdhatt wrote:
| I work for a company that sells images online. I could see a
| technique like this being used for NSFW images that come up in
| our search results. It would allow you to have an idea of the
| image before clicking into the image detail page to see the
| normal watermarked image.
| SamBam wrote:
| I agree. I also just don't understand the logic behind
| obscuring the most important part of the image, the one that
| people will base their decision on.
|
| A small, lower resolution image seems ideal. Anyone who's even
| considering buying a full-res photo isn't going to see a
| 200x300 image and say "what the heck, I'll just take that
| instead." If they did, they weren't going to buy the original
| either.
|
| And if you want to give the users a sense of the final
| resolution, you could take a corner of the image and show that
| at full-resolution, while making it clear in the UI that it's
| only a corner.
| barbazoo wrote:
| > After all, users would need to get a sense of what it looks
| like before they'd want to buy it.
|
| Interesting work but I doubt it's what anyone buying these assets
| would want.
| angryasian wrote:
| Great article, this is the content I come here for. I think its a
| really interesting thought experiment in how we might want to try
| things differently. Also thanks for sharing your experience with
| imagemagick and code.
| bberenberg wrote:
| I think this is a really interesting idea. Would love to see
| these results and other experiments also compared in terms of
| resulting file size.
| dpflan wrote:
| The impetus for this was to create a less blurred, more
| coherent preview image that is not the original image. Why is
| that? I suspect to entice people to want to pay for the images
| that are being previewed. The question is now: given there are
| different techniques, which techniques lead to a higher rate of
| purchases of previewable content (right)?
| oofabz wrote:
| If you want to go even further, Imagemagick can operate on the
| discrete Fourier transform of an image. The effects are
| unintuitive but powerful. Read the documentation at:
|
| https://legacy.imagemagick.org/Usage/fourier/#ft_application...
| AndrewOMartin wrote:
| This is a nice simple article exploring an interesting problem.
|
| I hope they use a fixed seed for their random function when
| probabilistically covering parts of the image.
|
| If not it might mean one could refresh the image a few times and
| get different parts covered. If so, you could then knit together
| a full image by combining just the uncovered parts.
| serjester wrote:
| While I'm not an expert, stitching together images like that
| seems like a far from a trivial problem.
| donkarma wrote:
| It might be an issue to automate but it should be pretty
| simple manually
| _def wrote:
| There is no need to generate more than one.
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| Doing the transform each time the image is requested would be
| stupid. You'd do it once on upload.
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