A Gif-wrapped Present
Properly attributing every internet image is about to get less daunting
ON JANUARY 8, 2015, in celebration of David Bowie’s 68th birthday, British illustrator Helen Green posted a GIF of the musician on Tumblr. A little over a year later, Bowie died, and Green’s animated portraits of him changing his appearance over his career spread across the internet. Many versions of the file have been shrunken, some have been stretched, and others cropped to remove Green’s signature from the lower-right corner. Fans must search out the artist to credit her when sharing the GIF, and Green must vigilantly track down people using it for commercial purposes if she’s to get paid or even acknowledged.
“An image goes viral, and millions of people see it, but the big disconnect is that information about what you’re looking at is lost,” says Mediachain Labs co-founder and engineer Denis Nazarov. Launched in December 2014 by Nazarov and Jesse Walden, Mediachain Labs is building an eponymous protocol that connects an image with the information relevant to it and allows for the development of other applications, like a service letting artists track their work across the web.
Origin details, such as creator, title and year of production, are routinely appended to images through notes called metadata. The problem is that metadata is often lost. To preserve that connection, the image and its metadata can be stored together in a database. By using a Tineye-like tool, the image or derivatives of it can be searched for in the database, which will retrieve the relevant metadata. That sounds like a great solution, but it would require Mediachain Labs to create and maintain a centralized database of images and metadata. While this approach works for Shazam, which identifies songs by searching for them in its library, building such a database for images would be laborious, costly and probably futile, given the overwhelming number of pictures online. Shazam works with 11 million songs; 1.8 billion photos are uploaded to the internet every day.
Mediachain’s protocol sidesteps that with a decentralized database. Participants provide access to their images and metadata. Thanks to decentralization and openness, the protocol transforms the seemingly impossible feat of collecting information about every image on the internet into a collaborative effort. Mediachain Labs has already amassed metadata on 2 million images, which it used to launch its first test network in July.
Mediachain is also tackling the deluge of images uploaded daily. It hopes developers will create, for instance, a tool that allows users to easily add their artwork to the database. “In a perfect world, if humanity had started with Mediachain,” Nazarov says with a laugh, “if the only camera was on your phone, where you were logged in, and every photo you took was time-stamped automatically, there would be no way it was possible for someone to claim something before you.”
Taking a different approach is the International Image Interoperability Framework. IIIF, pronounced “triple I F,” is a consortium of museums, libraries and universities committed to sharing their resources, or “interoperating.” Many such institutions maintain digital archives in diverse
formats, with images and metadata delivered through various, and often incompatible, means. This creates difficulties for anyone hoping to draw material from multiple sources in a uniform way. The most straightforward approach would be for every institution to settle on a standard format for image and metadata delivery, but that isn’t going to happen. “Nobody is going to replace their digital image infrastructure just to interoperate on some medieval manuscripts or whatever,” says Jon Stroop, an IIIF editor and applications development manager at the Princeton University Library, a member of the consortium.
Rather than asking every institution to redesign the channels through which its images and metadata flow, IIIF requests an additional, uniformly formatted stream. The IIIF community is made up of more than 60 cultural heritage institutions. Besides Princeton and the Getty, these include Harvard University, Wikipedia and the DPLA. Examples of applications that have been made according to IIIF specifications are Mirador, a gallery viewer that includes metadata display, and Openseadragon, which allows for the impossibly detailed viewing of large images.
As a partner of both Mediachain Labs and IIIF, the DPLA is in a unique position to weigh the benefits of each organization’s approach. The DPLA, which brings together the online resources of U.S. cultural heritage institutions and makes them accessible to internet users, has given Mediachain Labs access to its images and metadata and is advocating for adoption of the IIIF among its “hubs”—the libraries, museums and archives whose materials it aggregates.
Nearly 20 percent of the DPLA’S primary hubs have some version of IIIF. “It’s astonished me how rapidly IIIF has grown,” says DPLA Director of Technology Mark Matienzo. He also hints at a possible difficulty, pointing out that IIIF’S roster includes libraries and museums but few commercial entities.
Matienzo believes Mediachain Labs faces a similar challenge. Although it’s too soon for the company to have produced results from its collaboration with the DPLA, he is hopeful. His concerns center on the decentralized database, which he sees as being bleeding edge enough to avert widespread use, raising the question of how the protocol would integrate with the rest of the web.
Mediachain Labs has several answers for that. Besides the two previously mentioned applications (one letting artists track their work across the web and the other registering their artwork to the decentralized database), Nazarov describes how the protocol could combine the various online Creative Commons libraries, and Walden imagines it integrating with a blogging platform to give writers access to use-granted images—all with automated attribution, of course. Their reliance on third-party developers may seem hopeful to the charitable and delusional to the cynical, but Mediachain Labs already has more than 200 members in its open-source community, following or contributing work to the protocol, and the company sees no other way forward. Nazarov and Walden struggled with developing more fully formed applications before realizing that, first, it was necessary to build an open protocol as a foundation.
“We might want to think of ourselves as creative geniuses, but what’s more important than us coming up with this great experience is building a platform for anyone to come up with an experience that they think is valuable,” says Walden. And, he might add, for them to get credit for it.
1.8 BILLION PHOTOS ARE UPLOADED TO THE INTERNET EVERY DAY.