 | May 1, 2000 |
Downsizing made easy
Group promotes image-manipulation tools
Web masters face a tradeoff when placing digital pictures online. They must balance resolution (image quality) with file size (download time). Today's digital cameras and scanners produce images of much higher quality than can readily be used on the Internet, yet Web users often want access to the high-quality images.
This conundrum is just one of several that the Digital Imaging Group (DIG) hopes to address. An open industry consortium, DIG has released an open-source implementation of the Internet Imaging Protocol (IIP), available at www.digitalimaging.org.
IIP frees publishers from converting high-resolution images to lower quality for Web use. IIP-enabled sites can essentially downsample on the fly, while allowing users to zoom in on images they want to inspect closely. The Java-based client and server tools provide Web developers with a simple way to get started with IIP. The flexible royalty-free license also allows developers to integrate IIP in their own product offerings.
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