Unsavable Photos on the Internet

Imagine if you could send a photo to someone else that couldn't simply be captured or saved. In other words, a screen capture wouldn't work and neither would taking a photo of the screen with another camera. One of the first Java applets I wrote solved this problem. But, since then, I haven't seen this technique used anywhere (which probably means there's not much demand for it).

I still think there's a market for displaying photos that can't be captured. But this technique is only a feature... there's not enough for an entire business. I'm just surprised I haven't seen it used. I thought, with the advent of disappearing photos on SnapChat, that it would resurface. My technique for this is still one of my favorite hacks.

Apple Talk Mystery Photo [u]

Here's a minor mystery that has me stumped.

The group selfie photo I snapped.

Last week, I gave my Apple Talk in the Bay Area to a business delegation from China. I began the talk with a group selfie. As I snapped a few pictures, the group got up from their seats and huddled in the center of the room so they would be in my photo.

The group selfie photo that an audience member posted.

A little after midnight, a woman who attended my talk posted some photos from my presentation (she's in the front row, next to my left ear). At first, I didn't think anything of it when I saw she posted one of my selfie pics. Then, when I looked closer, I noticed that the selfie pic she posted wasn't one of mine. After comparing all of my group selfie pics to her photo, I noticed that it was from a slightly different vantage point. This had me (and still has me) puzzled. When I snapped my photo, I was standing in front of the room, up against the whiteboard, and there was a desk between me and the audience. In other words, no one was in front of me or near me.

So, how or where did she get a similar group selfie photo? 

After looking closely at her photo, I noticed a black line, in the upper left of her photo, which I've concluded is the edge of my phone. It seems that the picture she posted was a photo taken of my phone's screen as I positioned my phone and preparing to take the group selfie. Clever.

This theory of mine seems to make sense, except I can't figure out where the camera was located in the audience (lots of audience members snapped photos throughout my presentation). If you take a selfie photo of someone when they're taking a photo of your phone's screen then you'd expect to see them in the selfie picture.

My best guess, without claiming any "my phone was hacked" conspiracy theories is that the camera, which took the photo of my phone's screen, was out of frame or blocked from view by another person, despite the fact that her photo looks to have been taken head-on. And that theory seems to make sense because the same woman, later at Apple Park, showed me some photos she took of my presentation and she made the point that her phone's camera software (not an iPhone) had the ability to remove the keystone effect when a photo is not taken perpendicular to the subject. Basically, her phone's software has the ability to remove distortion from photos taken at sharp angles.

I still want to know where the camera was located in the audience that snapped the photo of my phone screen. Hmm.

Update 24 May 2018: Hear ye, hear ye. It took a couple weeks, but the mystery has been solved. It turns out that the inexplicable selfie photo was taken by my translator. She was standing next to me, in the front of the room, as we began and she took a selfie at the same moment I did, except she was out-of-frame in her photo. 

OS X SIPS Command

It's better to pass command line args as an array than a string.

If you've ever needed to rotate, resize, or convert an image, programmatically, then take a look at the OS X SIPS command. SIPS is a highly optimized part of Core Graphics (Quartz) designed for the Automator app. It's been around for nearly a decade (Tiger 10.4). I first heard about it when chatting with another Apple engineer who was developing it in Cupertino.

Since Java's early days I have been manipulating images inside of web apps. In the 1990s, Java image manipulation was very crude and slow. If I recall correctly, it could not be done, easily, on a headless server. I believe it required instantiating a Java applet (canvas) to do the manipulation, hence the need for a windowing system.

I've tried other Java image APIs including ImageMagick, but none could hold a candle to OS X's SIPS when it came to speed. The first time I tried SIPS, in 2005, I resized a 24 megapixel image into a thumbnail. When I hit enter the command prompt immediately returned so I thought it failed. It turns out it worked, flawlessly. A quick call to the command line is an elegant and simple way to implement SIPS in Java, or any other language. If you want to get fancy, you can spin it off in it's own thread so it doesn't block. As always, be careful to avoid any race conditions. (Now that I think about it, it's probably a better idea not to spin it off in it's own thread until you need to scale your code.)

I used SIPS exclusively with my photo sharing website (Epics3) that let users upload photos for storage in their own S3 bucket as a static web page. Although the Epics3 (and Adjix) servers are now defunct, along with Posterous, my images live on in AWS S3:
http://pics.joemoreno.com/2gi3

The downside of SIPS is it hasn't been continuously developed. Some of the things it can't do is overlay text or read GPS EXIF metadata.

But, after reading Dave Winer's request for a text image overlaying API, it got me thinking again. Especially when I proposed this idea for Twitter 519 days ago. I'm surprised there isn't already a popular text image overlaying REST API. Perhaps soon, very soon, there will be the API we seek.

Geotagging Privacy

Flickr keeps your geotagging data, but lets you hide it from the public.

I recently heard two parents of preteens commenting on privacy concerns when their kids posted photos to social media. They obviously were not aware that most smartphones embed EXIF metadata in photos. Most of this data is related to the photo and camera details such as the type of camera used, focal length, exposure time, f-stop, etc.

In addition to camera data, photos are sometimes geotagged with the coordinates where the photo is snapped. This geotagging feature can be turned on or off in the settings configuration depending on the user's settings. On iOS 7, it can be very handy for finding photos that you took months ago while on vacation since you can drill down into a map to find what you're looking for.

Obviously, geotagging can be a big concern for parents since some may not understand the implications of snapping a seemingly benign photo. Many social media websites automatically strip out this metadata. When tweeting a photo or posting it to Facebook, users have the explicit option to include their current location, regardless if a geotag is in the photo. The legal issue of geotagging is a bit more complex since it's very simple to change this data – just like changing a document filename or the name of a song in iTunes. Regardless, though, people, especially parents, need to be aware of it.

The Photo Behind the Photo

Michael taking a photo of a stranger taking a photo.

Last month I was walking to a San Diego Tech Week event with a former Apple coworker, Michael. He has a great eye for design and his work was regularly reviewed by Steve Jobs.

As we walked down the street, a woman stopped to take a photo, through a chain link fence, of some interesting artwork. As she snapped the photo, Michael had the presence of mind to snap a picture of this stranger. He showed her the photo and they exchanged phone numbers so they could text the images to one another.

A coworker taking a photo of me taking a photo.

Less than thirty minutes later, while at the event we were attending, Michael received the photo at the top right and we marveled at the impromptu collaboration that had just occurred. 

We don't know who the woman was, but, like Michael, she too obviously has a good eye.

Neat iPhone Photography Trick

I love photography with my iPhone. Since I got my iPhone 5 I have taken well over 11,000 pictures. One thing I wish I could do is take a photo with a remote shutter release. Sometimes – especially in low light – just depressing the virtual button on the screen (or the volume control) to snap a photo is enough to blur the image.


Today, I discovered that pressing the volume button on the iPhone's earphone cable will take a photo. Very handy – especially when you're trying to take a selfie at arm's length.

Of course this works equally well on other iOS devices as well as with third-party earphone volume controls.

High Dynamic Range Imaging

High dynamic range imaging (HDR) is my favorite camera feature that was released in iOS 4.1, last year. HDR allows you to take a photo with a higher contrast between light and dark areas (i.e. dynamic range).

The basic principle is simple. When pressing the shutter button, three photos are taken. One photo is normally exposed, another is underexposed, and the third is overexposed. These three photos are combined, on the fly, to create a single image where the overexposed areas of the normal photo are replaced with the areas from the underexposed image and vice versa.

Instead of areas of a photo being too light or too dark, they come out just right.

One downside is that you can't photograph fast moving objects since there will be noticeable movement in the final HDR image. However, Apple's camera app cannot only compensate for this, sometimes, but it also has the ability to take an out-of-focus or blurry photo and, amazingly enough, correct it. Another downside is when you want high contrast in your photo, since the point of HDR is to reduce contrast.

The iPhone gives you the option to save the HDR image, only, or both the HDR and the normally exposed photo. I recommend always saving both to the camera roll so you'll have the option to pick the best one.

Photojojo iPhone Telephoto Lens

I love to take photos with my iPhone – and I've taken thousands. One thing that I really wish the iPhone could do better is zoom. In photography, there are two types of zoom: digital zoom and optical zoom.

Digital zoom simply blows up pixels. If you've ever "overzoomed" into a photo then you've seen how blocky it is when it's pixilated. It looks terrible.

Optical zoom, on the other hand, uses lens optics to "magnify" the subject – it's as if you were physically closer to the subject when you took the photo. A 10x optical zoom will appear as if you were ten times closer.

In photographer lingo, they don't actually refer to telephoto lenses as "10x" – instead, they refer to a lens by its focal length, i.e. 400 mm, since that indicates the distance to the focal point, behind the lens, where the light rays will converge.

Optical zoom is always better than digital zoom. But, it's also more expensive, due to the added lenses, plus it's bulkier.

On Tuesday, Jeff Leon, a high school classmate of mine, showed me an ad for Photojojo's iPhone Telephoto Lens which is an 8x telephoto lens that's made specifically for the iPhone 3 or iPhone 4. Priced at $35.00, it was an offer that I couldn't resist. Plus, the more that I dug into this product's offerings, the more that I was impressed.

Not only does 35 bucks buy you an 8x zoom lens, which attaches to your iPhone with a simple snap on case, but it also comes with a tripod to hold your iPhone. Do you know how long I've been looking for a simple iPhone tripod? Answer: a long time!

Ordering the Telephoto Lens

I placed my order on Tuesday and I received the new zoom lens this afternoon. The entire process of ordering and waiting for my telephoto lens to arrive was more fun than I expected when I received e-mails from Photojojo like:

We just wanted to let you know that we got your order. You've got this online shopping thing down pat!

The next day, when my order shipped, I received an e-mail with a subject line that read:

Yay! Your Photojojo Order Shipped!

And, the best part was the way they signed off this e-mail:

We hope our box of photo goodies brightens your day and brings you super photo happiness!
xoxo,
Photojojo

Photojojo was just as excited about my order as I was!

Unboxing

When I opened the shipping box, I immediately noticed that the telephoto lens box had the same form factor as the iPhone 3 box. And, in the packing materials, I saw that they also included a green toy dinosaur tchotchke.

As I showed the triceratops to my wife, we got a huge laugh when our beagle jumped up and sank his teeth into the plastic dinosaur as he tried, unsuccessfully, to snatch it from my hand and eat it thinking that it was a yummy Greenie.

Included in the box:

• Telephoto lens
• Universal holder
• iPhone case
• Mini tripod
• Carrying case
• Cleaning cloth

Critical Assessment

I can sum up this product in one word: Fantastic!

It's well worth $35 – I would have happily paid more. The plastic case easily snaps onto my iPhone and then the zoom lens screws into the threads on the case. You can manually focus the lens, depending how faraway the subject it. The minimum focal distance is about ten feet.

The tripod mount also rotates a full 90° so that you can take photos in either portrait or landscape (or anywhere in between).

I took my iPhone 4 with the telephoto lens outside to snap a couple photos of the birds of paradise on my lawn using the Photojojo tripod. You can click on these two images to compare the details and see the difference. Both photos were taken from the exact same vantage point. It obvious that I'm a happy camper with this product.