Thursday, January 04, 2007

How to discover beautiful images (photos mostly)

Too often have lousy interfaces or inferior content mar the viewing of beautiful photography. This is the best method so far, that I have come across (if you have one better, please do share it!).


First we need a good filtering system:


a good one would be a Condorcet method
implemented here at http://thefairest.info/

A pairwise comparison method.
You see only 2 images at a time.
Not one more. Nor one less.
Just perfect.

What's more elegant is that
the voting process is so integrated into the viewing experience.
Something even babies instinctively know how to do.
Which is to point at what is pleasing to the eye.

Once chosen, another pair of images is presented.
The process is virtually invisible to conscious attention.
Just the pure pleasure of contemplating beauty.


Of course, it is also an instinct to look for longer periods of time at what is beautiful.
We want good images to be saved to our harddrive.

So, we use Opera.

  • Set the transfer window to not pop-up on download.
  • Set it to not pop-up download complete notification
  • the pair of images presented are thumbnails. We want the originals.
  • the links to the originals are below the images.
  • right-click the link corresponding to your preference (that is if any one of them is good at all, it happens sometimes, but hey, sometimes too both are good)
  • press a on your keyboard, to activate the "save to download folder" menu item
  • press F11 for fullscreen

Note:
  1. the "right-click" and "press a" actions should be a seamless combination. After awhile it would be second-nature and you wont even notice it.
  2. you don't, of course, have to use the interface as it is. Use whatever software you like that achieves the same result.
  3. use Greasemonkey, or an Opera style sheet to remove extraneous elements from the page. ( I may write a post on this later)


When you're tired, just fire up your favorite slideshow program and make it do a run through your download folder. Sit back, relax, and re-view those photos.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thank you for this tip,saerk.I am looking forward for more tips!

January 04, 2007 8:01 PM  

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