Flickr is boring
Today Sjors and I finished a major update on the Photography section. Mostly because Sjors wanted to keep up to date when I'm in Australia and beyond, the most important thing that got added was the ATOM feed. Use auto-discovery and feel the love.
Another mayor project had to do with breaking open the uploaded images themselves. Every digital images contains EXIF-information. This information includes the type and manufacturer of the camera, exposure times, aperture, etcetera. We rigged the photo album in such a way that prior to processing the image, it extracts the time the picture was taken and some technical stuff that's way cool for other photo geeks. All new uploaded images will contain this information.
The greatest problem we encountered had to do with focal length. Focal length is the amount a zoom lens has, well, zoomed in. No big deal. The problem arises when using different types of camera's. Some camera's have another crop scale, depending on the size of the sensor. Wanting to standardise output on 35mm, we had to perform some "mathematics" to get it all in line. For
instance, my Nikon D100 has a crop factor of 1.5, but my Olypus E10's factor is 3.9. We also built in support for compact camera's, but that was where the horror really started. It appears there are a lot of varying sensor sizes, varying from 4.0 to 6.0 crop. We settled for an average, since I hardly ever use a compact.
The last thing we added was a nice way to show the time a picture was taken. Nobody really cares at what exact second a picture was taken, so we used relative dates.
A final dilemma remains; should I add comments to pictures? People might be interested in some pixel-related banter.