Photographs as Data: the Dubious Future of Photographic Authenticity

I’m a bit late to post about this, but if you haven’t seen it yet, this is seam carving, and probably where convenience and presentation to the end user collides head on with photo journalistic integrity. I know that I care more about the authenticity of the scene, but I can easily believe that most readers–increasingly used to the idea of the “photoshop” and “untrustworthy photos”–will prefer something that’s automagically gorgeous on their iPhone or Kindle. Advertisers and designers will like it too, since static-sized photographs really are the bane of dynamic layouts.

Where readers and advertisers go, will editors follow? In the end, the solution may be to provide a link to a cryptographically signed original (the ability is already present in many cameras, and used for police work) that is available for download on a separate server. I don’t know why we don’t do this already.

The scaling is the big thing, but the the spot removal technique is interesting on it’s own right. It’s not today’s “painting over,” but it’s more like hiding something in the folds of a blanket. You can already download plugins for GIMP or do it using your web browser. Adobe has hired the co-developer of the technology–expect to see it in photoshop, PDFs and flash sooner rather than later.

In fact, let’s talk about a few other upcoming technologies.

The growth of Flickr’s immense pool of tagged photographs, open API and creative commons default licensing (a bit of a scam there, how many people would accept to share their photographs if they actually read the user agreement?) has really created a monster. A fabulous, beautiful monster that might one day eat up stock photo companies and maybe even encroach on the wires once camera-to-web technology takes off.

The API allows for searches that you can’t do on the traditional agencies, like this one here. Search through flickr CC-license photographs by color. Not crayon colors–”red, green, blue, apricot, periwinkle, salmon”–but real photoshop-color-wheel colors.

You might also be about to take a large number of photographs by many different people and create a three-dimensional world out of it. I don’t think we’ll be browsing any crime scenes using this technology yet, but it’s certainly a fascinating application. Imagine that you could take the millions of photographs of Ground Zero taken by professionals and amateurs and make a walkable world out of it.

Just watch the video:

Or download the application and try it yourself online. Browse landmarks, spacewalks:
Microsoft PhotoSynth Live Labs

A similar, if less esoteric technology uses the same pool of flickr images to clone-in data to complete scenes. Ever wish you framed a few inches to the left? Someone else probably has, and has agreed to let you use their data!
Scene Completion Using Millions of Photographs

Terrible in every journalistic sense, of course. But as a technology it’s equal parts “wow” and “what took them so long?” We live in exciting times, my friends.