Slashdot Mirror
Spencer Kimball's OnlinePhotoLab
Spencer Kimball, best
known for co-creating that little app known as The Gimp, wrote in to let us know what he's doing these days. He, along with four other XCF members have created OnlinePhotoLab.com.
Using the Gimp as a backend, it provides 50 megs of storage, and the ability to perform many normal gimp functions on images. Also provides an easy facility for sharing your images. Most interesting is the hardware. Spencer says "We have ten Linux boxes,
each a dual processor running four GIMP engines, for a total of
40 engines. We estimate we can process about a million image
requests per day. The cost of hardware was less than $25k." Here's hoping it can withstand the Slashdot Effect: it worked great
last night ;)
Do a search for "net-fu" and you should find what you're looking for.
...j
I remember someone was using GIMPs unattended filter application features to make it look as if the moving objects in his web cam were on fire.
Haha - Will have to make badtech part of my daily routine :))
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
http://www.fotoguide.com is what you want
Full disclosure disclaimer : I work for guideguide.com who do the fotoguide amongst other things. The bad news is it's Germany only, so far. So give us dosh to expand ;)
PS We use gimp, mod_perl, Linux, and other Free software. Any UK based Perl/LInux hackers looking for new jobs ?
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"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
A couple years ago a passing aquaintance of mine set up a site called CoolText.
However, while it's essentially the same thing (web front end to Gimp functions) it's really designed for putting together logos. It's a quick way to come up with web-type graphics.
CoolText has been up for at least two years, and the banner ads make Bryan enough money to pay for some of his classes.
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
It's not that hard. I use Perl-fu and the Gimp Perl server. On the web end I use Mason. I haven't made anything so complex as what Mr. Kimball has done here, but I did make a web-enabled button maker! It came from an idea I had about localizing bitmaps on web pages. Really useful for that sort of thing, but not something you'd want to do on the fly.
Anyway, it's not that hard to implement if you know a little Script-fu or Perl-fu.
I'm sure plenty of web masters have already figured this out, and have been using the Gimp as a backend for their sites for some time now.
I've heard lecturers speak before that they theorize that application serving will become the future method of software acquisition once bandwidth increases sufficiently to cover it. I have always considered that it would be something like downloading a small volatile copy of the program to run locally each time you launch it.
This is an interesting twist on the concept of application serving, since it presents a real-world useful application, gimp, through a standard interface, html, and provides remote processing and storage of data. Could this become a significant means of software distribution in the future?
And most importantly, what does this mean for the GPL? Clearly this usage of gimp is not a violation of GPL, by the very design of the license. They could make all the modifications they want to gimp, but as long as they do not distribute the binary, they do not need to distribute the source. Is this a potential loophole in the GPL that should be taken care of, is it a necessary evil, or is this a positive combination of open source software and closed business models?
I'm kind of curious as to whether you can link the images in your account from an outside page. Right now, I'm hosting my weblog on Pitas, which is a really cool free service for maintaining and hosting a text weblog, but doesn't (currently) give you the capability of uploading your own files. (My logo is currently served from another system where I have an account.)
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Weblogging Considered Harmful:
Unless you are doing a lot of image processing as well for all your visitors - doing a lot of image processing per user is a quick way to move the bottleneck to processor instead of network!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
The real point is that it's running Gimp. You'd be hard pressed to turn photoshop into a backend server...
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
- cooltext.com (no source and limited to the 'standard' text logos with gimp)
- A Tutorial for Perl Gimp Users, namely the section on the Perl Server.
however, you are going to have to be a little bit careful about opening up the full script-fu functionality over a cgi interface (unless you have no fear)...The only Good System is a Sound System
Dammit, The maximum file size is 5MB, this includes archives too. I have tons of files that are larger than that even tar.gz.
Here's my experience rushing from Gimp relaive newbie to Perl-Fu acolyte (not quite black belt that's for sure) on a deadline, in under two weeks. This tells me if someone is willing to keep an eye on a critical Gimp installation it's probably worth it..
/. effect better than your own multitasked server.
After a lot of struggle with Gimp (an old beta which undoubtedly was half the stability problem) I was able to build a Perl based compositing system and generate a thousand html pages and as many gifs and jpegs (with alpha masked, highlited thumbnails), using Perl-Fu to do repetitive operations and other Perl programs to rip representative layouts into templates and also to generate the pages with the right hypertext references (a db wasn't allowed). The data was a couple of CDs worth of Photoshop files (which I had to hand rip from layers into jpegs since many designers had worked on it) for 12 hotels.
It was all done from scratch in less than two weeks, and though I might have saved time using deBabelizer (I realized after I was hip deep in it) I ended up with some cool semiautomatic tools. The justification was that despite a very short deadline, changes were coming in from the client constantly. The volume was just enough (and my carpal tunnel looking scary enough) that I wanted to make it work badly. In particular new photos could be dropped into the source directory and a new site could build itself in about two minutes for page generation and two minutes for resizing and thumbnail generation. on a 450MHz PIII (Dell Inspiron laptop). Watching all the little windows open up and save themselves was honestly, a blast!
Some problems that I experienced were inability to open some seemingly good Photoshop files, 4-layer jpegs couldn't load, some functions I thought ought to work didn't, and other little bugs and crashes (the crashes were soft and quick). The biggest annoyance was Gimp's refusal to open dialog boxes on top of the main workspace, but this was not a Perl-Fu problem. Lots of time was taken with giving up on Scheme, figuring out how Perl-Fu worked, and adding fixes, like different numbers of thumbnails for different sections, preparing layout template code, deciphering strange source files from the designers, and automatically dealing with vertically oriented images.
This is great for when you have a ton of processing work, but if you want to run it from CGI or cron and don't have the author watching over the system I'd recommend very tightly limiting the kinds of operations you do with it, and watch the output. It might be very good for adding new images to a database-backed site.
If you want to experiment for a similar use as I did I recommend not trying to use scheme since you don't know what's going on, and start with running little programlets in perl, e.g. I modified the pgshell program so I could past a whole block from my processing programs into a buffer that would run it so I could test procedures.
On the other hand maybe this site is good advertising for Gimp stability.. at the very least with 40 processes they might handle the
"Hm, it says very little about what the company is going to live off... My guess would be the usual (=banner ads), since it says right there in the account usage policy that the account is free..."
;^)"
That or someone's large pocketbook.
"Also, I find the conceptual limitation to
photos somewhat interesting, as well."
That can be a bit intimidating at first.
"An image is an image is an image, I thought."
The better question that you have to ask is what is the difference between a sufficiently enhaced or chaged photo and an image?
"Well, it probably makes sense from a PR perspective, anyways."
That I really don't get.
"So, good luck, I guess!
Yeah any tool that is free and allows for greater expression and utility is usually a good thing.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
"Hey, I can't wait until all my computationally expensive projects can be done on someone elses computer. "
Woah there cowboy. I really don't think that's such a good idea. I think that running things on your own computer is a much better idea. Better control, better access, and faster development for all concerned. Distributing things to others and not having them yourself is a rather shoddy idea.
"Having to upload/download images can be annoying, though, even if you have a fast connection."
quite
"Has anyone developed a secure way that a webserver could mount a local directory? What about an insecure way?"
There are linux utilities that can allow you to access files from a remote location without the need of authentication.
The only similar type of thing I have seen is something for windows called X-drive or similar. You have a little addition to explorer that allows for a drive X: that is actually space on a remote machine. However I haven't seen anything for linux like that. Perhaps NFS?
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
"What the hell?! I spent countless hours trying to get Gimp Perl to work for an industrial application."
.15 which was when I first noticed it. How "unsupported" is unsupported?
Doh!
"I needed to batch process and manipulate a ton of images for a print project."
go on
"It turns out that Perl for Gimp 1.0.x is not terribly supported, while Gimp 1.1.19 was just too damn unstable."
I am running I think version 1.1.14 or
"After much experimentation, frustration, trial and error: the only conclusion was that as it currently stands... Gimp sucks."
No the logical colclusion is that the perl support for gimp sucks. Also they have python I think.
"Now I hear about this!!"
pretty impressive huh?
"How is it being done?"
I remember discussion about batch and remote processing using the gimp for a while just a natural evolution.
"Does the guy have his own custom-hacked version of Gimp?"
Maybe some tweaks. If he one of the leaders of the gimp project perhaps something more far reaching.
"So why aren't the modifications being redistributed under the GPL?"
Most likely because they haven't found the time or thought that their code was ready yet. Sounds like the perl support you tinkered with should have also been better tested.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
- Correct me if I'm wrong, but since the GIMP is GPLed, wouldn't they also have to provide the source if they let people download a non-source version?
Since he's the guy who wrote it, no, he doesn't. GPL does not affect the owner's distribution rights in any way. All it does is grant a few extra rights (with restrictions) above and beyond normal the copyright law to the general public."Prejudice is wrong; you should hate everyone the same."
I uploaded a couple of frames from tomorrows badtech cartoon to play around with, in reality of course it's not going to be all that useful but I can really see how this could be useful to amateur web designers who just want to make some thing more flashy. Needs a few more functionality though, and I need some broadband access before I can use it for any of my day to day tasks.
One of the hardest parts about creating web graphics is creating nice looking text. www.onlinephotolab.com offersmore fonts than I have ever gotten on my linux boxen at one time, and they are high quality too. This will immediatly become a very valuble tool for creating these things.
The preview of what each filter/logo/does is great. Half the time in the gimp I don't know exactly which filter I want to use. This makes the selection process easy!
Now...it would be nice if they were to release this cool "eGIMP" code in an easy to install form. I'd love to use it for myself on my own server. Web development "houses" would love a tool like this!
I think there is a market for this in package form. The whole online image storage would be great too, although I bet there are already some applications available that do that.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
So they've tied GIMP to a web server, and made it look pretty. Sounds like quite a good idea to me. And anyone can upload their snaps to use it, so you don't need to be a linux guru to get it to work, which is always a bonus.
But, wouldn't it make more sense for them to also offer the webified gimp for people to download and run on their own servers? It wouldn't have to be open source, just available.
That way, we don't need to upload our pictures onto their site, and they don't need to pay for all the bandwidth/processor cycles we use
or am i missing the point here?
The Gimp (and presumably this site as well) uses libungif. It can read LZW compressed GIFs (which is not a violation of the patent), and can produce GIF format images that do not use LZW compression (and are, therefore, larger than LZW-compressed GIFs).
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Open mind, insert foot.
The main source of revenue will probably be "fulfillment", or all the different ways you can turn your images from bits into physical objects. The coolest I've heard of is picture cookies (that's the kind you eat).
pretty slick guys. you ought to try partnering with some of these photo processing companies to have film processing automagically uploaded to your account. I had been using Wolf Camera and getting my photos on CD, but their quality is horrible. Almost all our pictures have a red line through them.
Some photography studios are like vultures in hospital maternity wards. As soon as my wife had our baby, they started throwing flyers at us advertising their services which is pretty much a lame picture of your hour-old baby. It must be the drugs, but *everybody* buys into it. We did. Of course, the next thing everybody wants is for the pictures to be on the web so friends and relatives can see them. Most have this service too. BUT NONE HAVE ONLINE PROCESSING! I tried the processing and its really cool. The only thing I couldn't find was a function to remove "red-eye". I'm sure its there but slightly disguised in the color manipulation options.
Good job.
Just curious--anyone know how they're dealing with the LZW patent? Last I heard, it looked like the gimp itself was on shaky ground by handling gif's. I suppose it wouldn't be that difficult for them to get a license for use on their own site, though. Ho hum.---Bruce F.
I went over and looked around the site. I do think it could be useful for home computer users who want to build vanity pages... maybe even some web designers. People will always be impressed with certain canned image manipulations. Problem is, most of us who want to edit images of any sort (including photos) already have an image program we can use, and know how to use, faster than we could by uploading files over a 56k modem. Chances are, if you have an electronic copy of a photo, you've got access to a scanner, and hence some type of image manipulation program.
'Tis a good idea still, and I wish them all the luck in the world.
This is wonderful. I wonder if they'll allow deep linking into gimp functions - it'd be neat if I could make a script that would adjust the image urls, such that I could 'ripple a page' (just the images on the page anyway) or do a contrast image on the page as i view it. This sort of thing might be neat functionality to build into a mozilla plugin. Help for the visually impared? Also, using the text plugin sites could autogenerate text images using crazy fonts and autoplug into their site. This is of course provided that the gimp site thingie posts via 'get' but I havnt checked that yet. Cool tho :)