ImageSnippets is an archival and curation tool. The goal of ImageSnippets is to build a persistent resource that establishes provenance and preserves the historical content and context of images. The application uses RDF syntax to ensure that the data entered will be readable in the future. RDF has become a standard, like HTML, and will likely be read by semantically aware devices for years to come. Additionally, the application saves data in a way that cannot be easily manipulated.
Anyone publishing and sharing images online.
ImageSnippets is a product specifically designed for images that you want to manage online. Just because you upload images to our application does not mean that you must publish or share them. ImageSnippets can be used simply for organizing images you want to find later, save, or preserve. Because ImageSnippets is online, whatever you upload has the potential to be viewed publicly. Privacy options will be available in the future, but if you truly want an image to remain private, do not upload it to any place online.
1) Images you are publishing online with metadata you have added. When you share images from ImageSnippets, the correct metadata will always stay with them.
2) Images you want to curate or organize that will be published in the future
3) Images you want to archive or save for the future
4) Images that you do not mind being online, but that you want to be able to find later using a better retrieval system (assuming you have used the system to add triples to aid in their retrieval)
The starting limit is 100MB. Currently we compress images while retaining scale to a shareable size (1024×768 maximum dimensions). This means file sizes are tremendously reduced, making 100MB plenty of storage for beginning users.
The system runs faster at this time by compressing images to or under 1024×768 maximum dimensions. This limit also offers additional “protection” for users who are concerned about their high-resolution images being downloaded without consent. Our primary area of research revolves around markup, retrieval, sharing, and publishing as opposed to hosting multiple file sizes of images.
Right now, an image search in ImageSnippets searches through all images, so anyone might see your image (at least in the small version that is stored on the ImageSnippets server) come up as a query result from anywhere on the Web. So don’t put any images there that you wouldn’t want people to see. Your actual account, where you can add or edit your own metadata, is secured by your login password, but that doesn’t prevent people from finding your images.
In later versions we expect to include private image corpora which are protected from general image searching, but that functionality is not yet available (and, frankly, is not one of our current priorities.)
ImageSnippets will import any metadata you already have on your images, so you do not have to add metadata twice.
Right now it is free, because it is still in beta and we want to gain experience with its use and get feedback from early adopters. In the future we plan to add features such as privacy options and enterprise portals, for which we will charge a fee from commercial users. Researchers and curators working for nonprofits will always have free access to the basic ImageSnippets system.
No. The code is proprietary, and some aspects of it are under patent. However, we welcome enquiries from software developers who might want to incorporate IS functionality into other asset management systems or image handling systems more generally.