Community Wishlist Survey 2019/Multimedia and Commons/Display rectangular part of the image as parameter of File and compatible with ImageNote

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Display rectangular part of the image as parameter of File and compatible with ImageNote

  • Problem: There are tens of thousands composed images, plates (and other similar images). There is need usually only certain part of such image to be viewed in encyclopedic article at Wikipedia.

    Compare the following images:

  • image from the museum
    image from the museum
  • cropped image of Rivomarginella electrum
    cropped image of Rivomarginella electrum
Creating such cropped images is very time consuming. It is necessary to download the image, crop it, create new descriptive name, upload the image, add proper description, add categorization, add links to source image and add link from source file to derived file. (It is also useful to improve the quality of the images, such as remove background, remove captions, or rotate the image.)
It would be useful if it would be possible to view the certain rectangular area of the larger image from Commons on the Wikipedia directly without needing to upload the cropped image.
  • Who would benefit: Editors will save time. Readers will have proper encyclopedic images in more articles.
  • Proposed solution: Use ImageNote template commons:Template:ImageNote as a parameter of File to show rectangular part of the image.
  1. I will go to the image page at Commons. For example https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Malacologists_1914.png
  2. I will add a note to the image with "Add a note button".
  3. I will go to the Wikipedia page. For example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truman_H._Aldrich
  4. I will edit the Wikipedia page and I will add the image
[[File:Malacologists_1914.png|thumb|Truman H. Aldrich|{{ImageNote|id=3|x=901|y=383|w=168|h=235|dimx=1782|dimy=1364|style=2}}]]
This is just an example how it should work. We can benefit from the fact, that using of the ImageNote is standard on the Commons already.
  • More comments: Some of such images (plates) are not needed at Commons at all, especially if they are at Internet Archive. But some of them are at commons only and are not accessible anywhere else.

    The cropped image of Rivomarginella electrum is not very high quality and it will be replaced immediately when probably any other image of the same species will be uploaded to Commons. Then the cropped image will not be needed at all (and could be deleted). But the deletion process is sometimes much more consuming than uploading images. Consider that there are over 100.000 of such images of molluscs only at Commons. It is not possible to do it manually (we have not such many editors with such much time), especially when we known, that at least some of such cropped images will be certainly replaced and will became unusable.

    Many images cropped from plates usually need some editing. In such cases will be this solution only temporal. This will help to save time to editors and meantime to show at least some image to readers.

    But we can use it for plates forever for such plates, that does not need alteration.

    This example is about molluscs only. But the usage of the solution is universal:

  • There are number of such details made from paintings. Usually without alterations.
    There are number of such details made from paintings. Usually without alterations.
  • Another practical application is the Wikipedia Main Page. There are usually more or less square details. There are usually larger version in Wikipedia articles, while on the Main Page there must be the same image informative and easily recognizable in 100x100 pixels.
    Another practical application is the Wikipedia Main Page. There are usually more or less square details. There are usually larger version in Wikipedia articles, while on the Main Page there must be the same image informative and easily recognizable in 100x100 pixels.
This wish is copied from Community_Wishlist_Survey_2016/Categories/Multimedia#CW2016-R080.
  • Phabricator tickets: no.

Discussion

  • One problem here is that this feature will depend on images to never change. For example, if someone's face was cropped from an image in wikitext like this: [[File:Foo.jpg|crop=320x240|cropoffset=50,60]] and then someone reuploaded Foo.jpg with frame removed, the offsets will change and a wrong part of the image will be cropped. MaxSem (WMF) (talk) 23:48, 2 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for your comment. I just copied the reply from previous discussion. I think, that 99.9% of images will never change.

This feature will be applied to images, that are expected to not be altered by cropping (see examples above). I can imagine only one way how could be the original image altered: with uploading higher resolution version over the file. It may or may not be recommended, but it can happen. Then would happen the same thing, that is happenning to Image Notes. (I did not test that, but I think, that Notes will move a bit.) If the user will use the rectangular part, then the Image Note will stay in the code of the image description. Uploader of the image should be responsible enough to avoid such problems. How many times a user damaged Image Notes when he uploaded larger version of file? I think, there is not known such case. It is not probable, that it will be a problem in this feature too.

Snek01 (talk) 12:35, 4 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Or alternatively, just make it possible for a particular image revision to be specifiable as the source of the crop. Jheald (talk) 21:12, 5 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I'm an editor on Wikisource, and, we need lots of illustrations printed in original work, especially for old galleries. I am currently thinking about developing a tool that makes a cropped image from original source on Commons. If we can instead support this proposed extension, or at least host an image cropper at Toolforge and make a log of every images uploaded via the tool, Wikisource editors will save a lot of time and readers can see more images on Wikisource.--Midleading (talk) 06:13, 4 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your comment. So I hope, that people from Wikisource and people participating in Community Wishlist Survey 2019 about Wikisource will also support this feature. Snek01 (talk) 12:49, 4 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
These images match, so the right one has a big margin. (See cropped version.)
collage
crops

This would be very useful, and overwriting existing files should be the exception anyway.

One example are matching images where a small object is scaled in proportion to a big one, which leads to a margin.
I often have that with different polyhedra around the same midsphere, as seen on the right.

Another example are of course collages like the one shown on the right. An aspect that I would like to bring up is that categorizing such collages can cause confusion, because it is not clear which aspect of the collage is categorized as what. In this case I have chosen to categorize only the cuboctahedron image under cuboctahedron etc., link the collage on the crop's page, and thus consider the collage to be categorized through the crop. Maybe for collages a category could be added like an annotation, and then only the crop would be shown in the category page — maybe even with an automatically generated locator like it is common in maps. Watchduck (talk) 11:04, 5 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Croptool makes it pretty easy to crop an image, and en:Template:CSS image crop can display a crop of an image without editing it. Galobtter (talk) 20:25, 5 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

  • A twist on this request would be the ability to define named crops of an image in the metadata in the Commons file page, and then to be able to access them using some syntax like [[File:MyPic.jpg#crop1]]
The image annotation system on Commons is likely to get a radical overhaul with the coming of structured data; compare eg how relative position within image (P2677) is used as a qualifier on the depicts (P180) statement of Portrait of a Woman with a Squirrel (Q17335769), here. According to the team, ImageAnnotations "will have to be tied into" Structured Data depicts (P180) at some time in future (Last bullet point on this page; see preceding pages for context).
A further change to the landscape will be if/when an IIIF image service gets integrated into the Commons image-serving back-end, see phab:T187872. (There used to be a trial service piggy-backed onto the infrastucture behind the Commons Zoomviewer, but both are currently down). An IIIF service would, amongst other things, allow image crops to be requested directly from the file-server, without having to be cut down by CSS. Jheald (talk) 21:34, 5 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Jheald: "define named crops of an image in the metadata in the Commons file page" I like this idea. I think it's a better approach than most that have been suggested wrt to cropping so far. Be sure to document it in the relevant tickets. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:18, 6 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Oh, and I note that our current image service technology (thumbor) also supports serving cropped versions of images. It's probably not enabled, because there is nothing in the stack that would be able to use it, but internally it could easily be used as a cropping service. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:21, 6 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Voting

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