I’ve mentioned in earlier posts about new opportunities to make photos interactive using digital watermarks. Today’s smartphone cameras are finally reaching the point where they can be used to detect and read digital watermarks in printed images used in magazines, newspapers, etc. This allows readers to use their mobile phones to link from the printed page to video, the Internet, promotions… all kinds of stuff. We see similar capabilities with campaigns using 2-D barcodes, but for the “image purists” out there, digital watermarks basically become an invisible barcode so you can get the same experience without having an ugly symbol cluttering up the image.

Last week, autofacil (a popular car magazine in Spain) launched its first issue using interactive images. 

My favorite books are on a single shelf. All our music is in the same directory. And the few movies that we own are all in the same hutch. However, when it comes to photos it’s a different story. A handful of printed images still reside under our bed, mobile phone photos are on Picasa, our wedding and other event DVDs are in the office and yes I back up images quarterly to an external hard drive.

But if you asked me “where is that recent photo of...” I would have to search multiple places before I found it. Why is this only an issue with my photos? Michelle Slatalla over at the New York Times had a similar experience when Kodak let her know that she needed to archive her images.

So, where do you store your images?   

Some of the most common image formats you will encounter when working with digital images are JPEG, BMP, GIF, PNG, and TIFF. Before getting into each of these, it’s important to get a little briefing on lossy vs. lossless compression. Lossy compression, such as JPEG, decreases the size of the image by discarding image detail, while lossless formats, such as BMP, PNG or GIF, compress the image without discarding any detail, but are larger in size. Here we go:

A few weeks ago I mentioned that I was looking into Adobe's Lightroom and would be following up with a look at Apple's Aperture.  So I'd like to poll the blog readers to see if there's much interest in these hybrid solutions for managing and editing your photos.

Speaking as someone who has watched the photo industry from black and white prints to color to Polaroids that provided instant gratification to the ever advancing digital cameras we all use today, I continue to be fascinated by the power and value of images.

A few months ago, I sat in a conference session with a company that manufactures very tiny miniature cameras. Their vision was for these little cameras to be located literally everywhere so that consumers no longer had to take their own photos, but could request images taken from a specific location, time, perspective, etc.

If you are browsing the Internet using Internet Explorer or your local hard drive with Windows Explorer, there is a way to quickly check if there are watermarked images on a website or in a folder.  The Digimarc Reader for Images is a free download that will enable you to read watermarks while browsing with Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer.

This is a nice feature, especially if you are looking for watermarked images and don’t want to keep Photoshop open to read the watermarks. Notice that I refer to these PC Explorers by their “formal” names as though they are two separate applications. This is because these applications are not exactly the same and why the reader software behaves slightly differently with each app.

In Internet Explorer, the reader software can read digital watermarks embedded in the following file formats BMP, JPG, TIFF and PNG.

 

It’s been busy at work so every now and then I need a few minutes of distraction so I can refocus on the tasks at hand.  So there’s nothing about digital watermarking today, just something silly to help you refresh before getting back to watermarking your digital photo gallery.

The folks at Photojojo.com had a short story about this great link which proved to be quite fun when I needed a short break.  It’s time to Zombify yourself at the Oddcast website and maybe a few co-workers. Spend 5-10 minutes being creative and of course you can really creep yourself out like I did…

Now it’s back to work for me.

Attention camera buyers! I was reminded again of this post's title/well known saying when I finally went to purchase the camcorder I had been waiting to buy for months. When I saw the demo of the new Canon Vixia HF S100 at CES, it was love at first sight and I knew I had to have one.  Being the wise, non-impulsive shopper that I am, I had monitored the web for the best deals and was amazed to find this $1200 camera available for $519!

By applying a Digimarc digital watermark to your images, you have quite a few options for what to display when other people read the embedded watermark. And what’s great is that this data lives on with the image as it travels throughout the internet — even through file format conversions, manipulations, copying and more. The following are options available to you today for information you can include in your unique, persistent digital watermark:

One of the cool things about my job here at Digimarc (other than getting reminded that this blog post is late) is that we stay closely connected to the latest industry trends and product rumors that impact our business.

I’ve been following a particular Nikon rumor for about a month. Rumors varied a bit but the one I honed in on was a potential new SLR camera offering. The rumor was that Nikon would release a digital SLR camera at a hobbyist price point...