I'm a student developing a new storage format for photos and am looking for input

erinburk60 · Aug 10, 2014

Hi everyone!
I'm Erin! I'm a computer science student from Arizona (although I currently live in Berlin, Germany). For my Master's thesis, I'm developing a new long-term storage format for digital images that maintains the original fidelity of an image (think RAW) but is much smaller and supports means to efficiently save multiple copies across different storage locations. The file format will be open and patent-free and I'm hoping to get my thesis published by spring of next year.
Anyhow, I'm currently collecting some data points for the introduction of my thesis and as my work is mostly directed towards photographers, I was hoping you guys could answer some questions:
Here's the survey in case you're interested (should only take a few minutes):https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1xt8JbZgHyj9Sn1ybmPR8baQg9YWl9n6mjrfk_4zDiyI/viewform
Thanks a bunch in advance!
Please forgive me, if this is the wrong forum!:blushing:
Cheers, Erin

ristretto · Aug 10, 2014

Done!

erinburk60 · Aug 10, 2014

Thanks!

Msteelio91 · Aug 10, 2014

Completed!

Majeed Badizadegan · Aug 10, 2014

Did your survey because I'm interested in what you're working on. As a thank you to us for helping you, please come back here with the findings of your research.

Thanks.

vintagesnaps · Aug 10, 2014

Doesn't look like the survey includes images originally shot on film, which of course requires physical storage so I don't know if or how that fits into your research and thesis.

What do you mean by 'patent-free'? (that question came to mind). To me that sounds like an original process being created and not being registered or protected but maybe that isn't what it means for this purpose.

The_Traveler · Aug 10, 2014

Done, altho the question 'how many pictures do you take and keep' is a bit confusing.

I take a great many but cull pretty ruthlessly. So I might keep x but have taken 5 or 10x depending on circumstances.
I assume you wanted to know how many I add to my archive each month and answered that way.

Best of luck.

Come back.

erinburk60 · Aug 11, 2014

vintagesnaps said:
Doesn't look like the survey includes images originally shot on film, which of course requires physical storage so I don't know if or how that fits into your research and thesis.

What do you mean by 'patent-free'? (that question came to mind). To me that sounds like an original process being created and not being registered or protected but maybe that isn't what it means for this purpose.

Thanks for your feedback. I'm not currently thinking about analog so much because physical storage is an entirely different space that I know very little about. Obviously scanned negatives/positives would also benefit from my solution.
As for your question regarding patents: my work is based on algorithms that are either in the public domain or whose patents have since expired. It also includes an original compression algorithm that I intend to file a patent for but then release into the public domain (I haven't figured out the legal implications yet, but I want to make sure nobody else files an exclusive patent on my algorithm.) Hope that clarifies things!

erinburk60 · Aug 11, 2014

Majeed Badizadegan said:
Did your survey because I'm interested in what you're working on. As a thank you to us for helping you, please come back here with the findings of your research.

Thanks.

Thanks a lot for filling in the survey! I'll report back with results once the thesis is done!