Hi, Leonard Rosenthol <leonardr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > >For image web galleries, I'd suggest they use GIMP in batch mode > >to convert to another format or to create the thumbnails directly. > >That would probably have been a way to go for ImageMagick too. > > For whatever reason, most (all?) of the products in this > space have chosen to use IM (or something similiar) to do the > conversions rather than going to GIMP. If I were to guess, I would > suspect it's because they can interact with IM directly from Java, > Perl and PHP instead of having to build "batch files" and then run > Gimp (higher overhead). yes, the GIMP batch mode sucks and we know that. Actually I do point everyone who asks about batch conversion to ImageMagick. This will improve considerably in GIMP-1.4, but convert will probably stay the tool of choice for most batch-conversion jobs. > >It is as much a bad choice for image distribution as > >Photoshop files are, or Word files for exchanging text documents. > > I would argue that for "non-simple" images, the Photoshop > format has a lot going for it! Sure, if all you want is a "flat > bitmap", it's WAY OVERKILL - but for layered CMYK images with clipping > paths, it's the way to go! In fact, I once had a client with the > requirement of taking CMYK images with 16million colors and either > transparency or clipping into PDF/PS documents. The only image format > that met the requirements was Photoshop/PSD. Unfortunately you are probably right here, but this does not make PSD a better format for image distribution (because it is proprietary and poorly documented). Actually we discussed a better XCF format on #gimp lately and one of our goals was to design an image format that could serve our needs in The GIMP but would also be open for things we don't support (yet). An important aspect of the design was to make it easy for other applications to read, modify and create this format. Such a format would serve well as a distribution and exchange format for complex image data and should of course be supported by ImageMagick. I don't know if it would be possible to define a format that would meet the additional very GIMP-specific requirements that came up during the discussion, so we might end up defining a very GIMP-specific XCF2 format again. However it seems there is the need to come up with an image format for distribution and exchange of complex image data. Instead of spreading the existing XCF format, which is very limited, we should evaluate existing formats and if we come to the conclusion no such format is available, we can create our own, document and implement it. This can and should be a combined effort of at least the GIMP and the ImageMagick developers, probably including GNOME and KDE people. I promise I'll try to write down our thoughts on a better XCF format soon, but I have to get back to work now... Salut, Sven
