Sunday, April 8, 2007

Imagekind observations

Just started peddling prints over at ImageKind. My first impressions are pretty good. The focus on art and presentation is really nice. The selection of papers, canvases, mattes, and framing is quite extraordinary. This being a new site, there are some annoyances however. I. signing up does not work in Safari, the best browser out there, but the site does not warn you about this. Fortunately, my second choice, Firefox, works fine. Firefox, however, does not do color correction of images on web pages. II.Images on the ImageKind webpages are in untagged color space, even if you upload a tagged image. This is bad form (see here for an example why this important. Luckily, when you click on an image, the resulting large preview is in a tagged color space. This is good, however, it causes color shifts between the small framed preview and the larger image. Flickr, for example, keeps the color space tag intact in their scaled images, assuring correct color in smart browsers. This is a little disappointing for a fine art oriented website. It is details like that that make me love flickr. III. They do not seem to support wider color spaces than sRGB, at least I cannot find any evidence of it. Now I could be wrong, but if true, this is strange for a website that sells prints from fine art, which very generally falls outside of the very limited sRGB gamut! IV. When uploading images, the website ignores all the exif tags, so all the keywords you assign in advance are ignored, just like the title tag. This causes a LOT of extra work tagging and describing your images. Again, flickr gets this right. Now, I really appreciate the service, but they need to address the pesky little details.

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