{"id":1551,"date":"2016-09-19T12:51:07","date_gmt":"2016-09-19T12:51:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/?p=1551"},"modified":"2016-09-19T12:51:07","modified_gmt":"2016-09-19T12:51:07","slug":"image-focal-point-hint","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/2016\/09\/19\/image-focal-point-hint\/","title":{"rendered":"Image focal point hint"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is a quick idea that may already exist somewhere. Let me know if “there’s a vocab for that”.<\/p>\n

We have a large set of images of our university buildings. There’s a variety of sizes & aspect ratios. Sometimes there’s more than one image of a building.<\/p>\n

To render these in the university templates we need to trim them to certain sizes and aspect ratios. What would be useful is if we could store a “hint” of where the most important content is in the picture. For example take this image:<\/p>\n

\"tinkering\"<\/p>\n

Clearly the most important part of this picture is the relationship between the researcher and the tool. I would say about here:<\/p>\n

\"tinker<\/p>\n

Which is about 36% from the left, and 50% from the bottom. What I’m wondering is if there is (or should be) some standard terms for indicating the focal point of this picture eg.<\/p>\n

<http:\/\/example.com\/pictures\/research.jpg> ns:focalPointX \"0.36\"^xsd:float .\r\n<http:\/\/example.com\/pictures\/research.jpg> ns:focalPointY \"0.5\"^xsd:float .<\/pre>\n
That way our HTML page generation can get cropped images but instead of a default focus (usually the centre point) it could know how to crop for this picture. You can see the results of making a portrait crop of this image using a focal point hint and without:<\/p>\n
Without hint:<\/p>\n
\"pic4\"<\/p>\n
Using hint:<\/p>\n
\"pic3\"<\/p>\n
I think this makes a massive difference and seems like a really useful thing to optionally store with our images and publish as part of the metadata for them in the open data service<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Other useful metatags for images linked in open data would be:<\/p>\n