Is posting large images online for good viewing possible?

[nicolas claris]

It's been a long time now that we discuss here and there abotu showing full res crops or even full image online.
Some of us are (with good reasons!) affraid to do so because their image could be then stolen.
We all need to protect the images we do produce because they are our living!
Beside educating our youngers (not to grab images from internet -nor videos, texts and music), we still from time to time need to show full res to demonstrate technical issues or beautiful rendering of a MF back.
Recently we had the start of a discussion with Alain (Briot), Bart and some others, here:
http://www.openphotographyforums.com/forums/showthread.php?p=71777#post71777

I did propose the use of Zoomify, which is free.
It uses a viewer (flash) that assemble hundreds of image's crops stores by 256 in different folders.
Here is a sample of a Zoomify(ed) image made of 451 tiny crops:
http://mnclaris.free.fr/forum/Zoomify/Bdx_fair/_45R7683_C1-4_8bit.html
Here is a sample of thumbnails in a window:

I tried CS4 (crashed!) and Autopano to reassemble the image with no success. When one sees all these small crops with no overlapping, one can understand that it is almost impossible to rebuilt sucesfully the image.
Now, I presume that the big puzzle can be achieved manually with a lot of patience, but I assume that it would be faster and easier to buy a print from Alain and take a repro shoot of it if one wants to still and sell more samples of it…

There is no real hope for perfect protection nowadays, we still have to educate young and old potential thieves…

So do you have any other suggestion?
If this an interesting subject for you, I suggest we continue herE.

 

[Asher Kelman]

Nicolas,

I'm all for it. This is really helpful in two circumstances. First in scenes where one "looks through a window" into a world and can turn one's head to one side and then the other. Here its natural to be able to look around. Zoomify gives this experience on steroids.

The second case is where one puts one's nose to the image, 2 cm from the picture, to look at photographic detail as in comparing lenses or looking at detail for a print to be made at massive size.

Otherwise, large pictures in OPF can be too large to comprehend in one glance.

Zoomify would deal with all these issues.

Asher