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 ;)
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.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
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 :)