Since I read Airbag at work, and work has some serious proxy blocks in place for anything that it considers potentially harmful or misusable, I couldn't browse this link:
Content-aware image resizing This is scarry, and not in a good way.
Naturally, I wondered, and I finally remembered it when I got home. I found two different links to essentially the same presentation. One was the one provided on Airbag (which was blocked at work for fear that I might learn (gasp!) hacking! and the other was a comparatively safe O'Reilly (the technical book publisher, not the douchebag). But even if I'd found that one, I wouldn't have been able to see it anyway because the presentation was hosted on YouTube, which is blocked at work for fear that I might become (gasp!) social! But that's a rant for another time.
This rant is about a technical idea someone had to minimize a picture while keeping most significant elements in it. Rather than taking out entire rows or columns of pixels to make the image smaller, the algorithm takes out specific paths of pixels, allowing the important parts to keep their aspect ratio while squeezing them into a smaller space. They do this by removing the unimportant parts. This is supposedly better than cropping, which may remove major details from around the picture, or resizing, which removes parts of major details from the middles of pictures.
Interesting? Having seen the video, I'd say so. Is it nifty? I'd agree there too. Cool to watch? Yep. But good? To borrow a turn of phrase from James Lileks, "Sweet smokin' Judas, what were they thinking??!?!
Remember that saying "a picture is worth a thousand words"? Well, their market value just plummeted. It's as if someone thought Photoshop wasn't prevalent or easy enough to use already. "No, it's too much work to go in and turn a picture into a total liar by consciously removing or changing elements. We'd like to be able to resize the image and just have them go away automatically."