Media, image resize in a way you have not seen before

Over at the SIGGRAPH 2007, Shai Avidan and Ariel Shami something you really have to see, context aware image resizing.

(note: if you read this via an RSS feed, see the video on youtube.)

Image resizing with an x and y axis that keep the same ratio is easy and can be done by any imagemagic-a-like tool that can be used in for example Drupal. Resizing can also be done with some CSS. See for example debatte.welt.de and make your browser smaller.

But what if you want to dynamically resize a picture without keeping the aspect ratio? The only option is to crop right? Wrong. With the report they presented and the video linked above, you can find where you can add or delete pixel lines in the picture. And you can even use weights to prevent parts of the image to be erased or to be let it erased first when making changes to an axis.

It would be great if this kind of image handling would end up at one of the supported image tools under Drupal. And it would be great as well if Drupal 7 (after the upcoming Drupal 6 version) would focus on media handeling in drupal something that is really needed.

D7, the media release?

Wow....

This is totally awesome... reckon the most likely candidate module for inclusion of this technique might be imagecache?

Totally agree with your comments on media handling in Drupal. I opened my mouth about this before and got shot down, but it needs sorting out IMO.

By NikLP (not verified) at Sun, 26/08/2007 - 1:16am | reply

Coming from a journalism background

any photograph subject to manipulation like that should be clearly labeled.

It's cool and all, but I'd sooner see smarter crop and scale for thumbnails, and simply for scaling as the window resizes, than have picture munging become standard on web sites.

By Benjamin Melançon (not verified) at Sun, 26/08/2007 - 5:13am | reply

in CSS3.1?

What would be reallyreally cool, besides having a serverbased system (imagemagic) for this, would be a CSS implmentation for this:

Imagine:
img.thumbnail {
height: 40%;
width:40%;
rezise-method: energy-seams;
}

Then the browser would implement the techniques from Avidan and Shami to resize the image. Obviously the CSS implementation would need much more paramters and options, but I guess, having this method in CSS and browsers supporting it, would be a huuuuge step forward.

By Bèr Kessels (not verified) at Sun, 26/08/2007 - 1:20pm | reply

EasyPic is a simple and free picture resizer

Try my free program.
http://www.kongtechnology.com/easypic/

By Kitkat (not verified) at Wed, 29/08/2007 - 9:01am | reply

The seam carving technique

The seam carving technique is fantastic. I don’t know whether or not it will be implemented in Photoshop or not, because I heard Adobe hired the inventor. Anyway for me there can’t be a better tool that Reshade for image resizing. The results I get with this are stunning. I couldn’t believe it myself but I’ve tried their online free tool and since then I keep recommending this tool.

By reshader (not verified) at Fri, 02/05/2008 - 1:02am | reply