The History

This Webpage has the intention to offer Amateur Photograpgs the Opportunity to share their High Resolution JPEG Pictures to other.

With the acquisition of a digital camera, the amount of photos I've taken over time has grown. When I came back from a USA trip in November 2001, I traveled through California, Colorado, Minnesota, Illinois and Maine and had about 5000 pictures in a high resolution format on my Laptop.

Since I visited some friends I got to know online, I wanted to share those pictures with my friends. Additionally, the necessary hardware to make a slideshow at home with digital pictures is pretty expensive (a beamer still costs a fortune) and so presenting the pictures online is the only option.

So, I created my first version of my Website to share these pictures.

But these pages didn't work well with Netscape, I disliked their layout over time and I really missed some more flexibility with presenting the pictures, a flexibility which comes only with using appropriate tools like MySQL, PHP4 and Perl.

Another approach was that I would eventually like to sell the rights to some of my pictures because a friend of mine who is also a photographer told me that I have some photos which are pretty good and there are always picture agencies who look for those kind of pictures.

I visited some of these agencies on the web but none of them had the layout or the opportunity to upload some thousand pictures on their server, and after I saw the quality of some of their pictures, I realized that I can do better.

The idea was born; the idea to create a place on the Web where I can upload all my pictures and share them with friends and the rest of the Internet. But the whole presentation shouldn't be just another folder hierarchy with HTML files. I wanted a flexibility which is only possible with using an underlying database and so I started from scratch, developing and designing this Website all by myself with using the tools mentioned above.

About

This Website has the intention to share pictures over the Internet - If you want to be part of this little but growing community of photographers, please follow the link the Registration form.

However, the intention of this site is not only to share the photos with the masses, but also to find someone - a private person, a newspaper, a tourist office of a certain place - any organization who likes a certain picture so much that he or she would like to buy the rights of a certain picture for the purpose of publishing. This site therefore has more or less the purpose to connect people who create photos with other people who want these photos.

The Concept

Everybody who is considered a member of the site can upload digital pictures in the well known JPEG format as a picture album. These pictures should have the resolution of at least 800x600, but much higher resolutions are strongly recommended.

After the upload, the pictures are converted. This conversion takes a long time for a whole bunch of pictures in an album and therefore runs in an asynchronous mode. That means that all uploaded ZIP Archives are only processed every hour at the top of the hour. therefore nobody is able to see the new uploaded album right after the upload.

Each JPEG picture in any format will be reduced to lower resolution JPEG pictures during the process of converting them. The reason is that although the high resolution picture with a resolution of let's say 2240x1680 is best for printing and publishing, it's very bad for presenting it on a webpage. It would require scrolling, takes a long time to download and since the creator eventually wants to find a buyer for that picture, it would also be a little stupid to make this picture downloadable for everybody.

So the original picture is converted into the formats 800x600, 640x480, 240x160 and 120x120 and additionally a personal Copyright Watermark is inserted into the picture with the 800x600 and 640x480 resolution.

The original picture itself is transferred into a directory which is password protected and accessible to the Owner/Creator and Webmaster only.

Look at this page to see an example. http://www.macmurph.com/photodb/details.php?picture_id=4458

It shows the Thumbnail of a New York Picture from me and the locations of the other copies in the various resolutions. The link to the photo with the highest resolution, however, requires a password.

Every member is free to use his/her own low resolution pictures for any purpose, for example, everybody is free to use these links from his/her own homepage.

However, if a third party wants to use or acquire the picture, he has to contact the Webmaster or the Owner who exclusively have the ability to access the original picture in the highest resolution without the watermark.

It's the subject of negotiations between owner, Webmaster and the person or organization who wants that picture to make the deal perfect.

Getting the rights to use a picture depends on many factors. It depends on the duration of the usage (limited, unlimited), whether or not it can be used exclusively or not, and the number of editions the pictures shall be used. All these questions are topics of negotiation between Buyer and Seller.

This is the Idea of my Site. Please sign my Guest Book, if you want.

MacMurph Aka Florian Meyer, Germany, September 13. 2002 macmurph@macmurph.com