February 21, 2004

Virtual Lightbox 2.0

Amit Kumar and I are pleased to announce the release of the Virtual Lightbox 2.0 (screenshot).

Written in Java, the Lightbox is an inline browser applet for image comparison and manipulation. Users can import images into the applet’s display area, arrange them in any configuration simply by clicking and dragging, magnify them, and apply basic image processing. The Lightbox will be of potential interest to anyone presenting images on the Web in a context where active comparison—what John Unsworth calls a “scholarly primitive”—is desirable:

http://www.mith2.umd.edu/products/lightbox/

New features in version 2.0 include: compatability with Macintosh OS X; the ability to save and re-open the contents of the applet in any state; the ability to add images from a local file system to the applet’s current display; mouseover captions for the images; improved behaviors for image movement; and numerous other small fixes and enhancements.

The Virtual Lightbox is both free and open source, available under the terms and conditions of the GNU General Public License. It has been developed with the ongoing support of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). Feedback and comments welcome: lightbox-feedback@mith2.umd.edu

Posted by mgk at February 21, 2004 02:45 PM
Comments

Congrats to both you and Amit on the new version!

Posted by: Jason at February 23, 2004 10:36 AM | Link to Comment

A very useful application... the icon of a pencil eraser makes me think of erassing with precision -- at first I thought it might be a masking tool, then I thought it might erase a single picture. Of course the tool tip says what it does, but I still surprised myself a couple times by wiping out the whole screen.

Maybe a big eraser, or a bathtub drain, or a modified "tile" icon with red X's over everything?

Adding the ability to crop would be great.. and what about overlaying images?

In my "Media Aesthetics" course we briefly discussed this Sistine Chapel image, and students have been frustrated by the difficulties of producing images in context for their oral presentations. I'll happily bring this tool to their attention.

Posted by: Dennis G. Jerz at February 25, 2004 01:40 PM | Link to Comment

Whoops -- I see that transparent GIFs, even animated ones, work just fine.

Posted by: Dennis G. Jerz at February 25, 2004 01:43 PM | Link to Comment

Correction... when I save and reload a lightbox session with a transparent GIF, the transparent background has been changed to white.

I also find that I'd love to be able to right-click and rotate images.

Sorry to give you all these little complaints -- I'm happily using your tool and can think of all kinds of applications for it.

Posted by: Dennis G. Jerz at February 25, 2004 01:47 PM | Link to Comment

Being able to show and hide individual images is great... would it be possible to remove one image from a set-up, rather than wipe the whole thing?

Posted by: Dennis G. Jerz at February 25, 2004 01:49 PM | Link to Comment

You call 'em complaints Dennis, I call 'em feedback. And very useful too. A lot of these items are already on our to do list (see the very bottom of the Applet page) and I hope to see them all in version 3.0. In the meantime, the Lightbox is also open source, and we're very open to other developers pitching in and adding to its capabilities. Send me URLs if/when you implement this for your classes, etc.

Posted by: MGK at February 25, 2004 01:56 PM | Link to Comment

For the moment, I've simply posted a link to your Sistine Chapel demo...

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/nmj/002507.html

Posted by: Dennis G. Jerz at February 25, 2004 03:05 PM | Link to Comment
Due to the proliferation of comment spam, I've had to close comments on this entry. If you would like to leave comment, please send email to me at mgk =at= umd =dot= edu. Thank you.