Storing art direction information in an image file
Posted: 2012-08-18T05:05:35-07:00
Hi all,
I'm looking at the idea of storing additional data in image files to provide crop guides for resizing the image, and wondered whether anyone's done this before and how it could/should be done. The background is that I work for a newspaper, and we produce large images all the time, and we want these to be viewable in lots of different layouts, orientations and screen sizes. Many images have lots of 'background space' that could be cropped off to allow the image to fit an unknown aspect ratio without losing any of the subject, but you'd need to know when a too-aggressive crop would chop off someone's head!
Equally, when a group shot (say a photo of the UK Olympic team) needs to be shown at a very small size, it may be preferable to recrop it to show only a few of the people at the centre of the shot, but you'd want to do this in a way that avoided cropping half way through a person.
So, I think I'm looking for a way of using EXIF or PNG metadata to store 'suggested crops' as well as allowable variations to account for unknown aspect ratios. The user agent can then read the metadata and choose a crop that is closest to the size of the canvas, making adjustments within the allowable variations for that crop.
Is there any existing support for this kind of thing in any image metadata format? If not, is there a way that it is conventionally done?
I'm looking at the idea of storing additional data in image files to provide crop guides for resizing the image, and wondered whether anyone's done this before and how it could/should be done. The background is that I work for a newspaper, and we produce large images all the time, and we want these to be viewable in lots of different layouts, orientations and screen sizes. Many images have lots of 'background space' that could be cropped off to allow the image to fit an unknown aspect ratio without losing any of the subject, but you'd need to know when a too-aggressive crop would chop off someone's head!
Equally, when a group shot (say a photo of the UK Olympic team) needs to be shown at a very small size, it may be preferable to recrop it to show only a few of the people at the centre of the shot, but you'd want to do this in a way that avoided cropping half way through a person.
So, I think I'm looking for a way of using EXIF or PNG metadata to store 'suggested crops' as well as allowable variations to account for unknown aspect ratios. The user agent can then read the metadata and choose a crop that is closest to the size of the canvas, making adjustments within the allowable variations for that crop.
Is there any existing support for this kind of thing in any image metadata format? If not, is there a way that it is conventionally done?