On Fri, 30 Mar 2012, Matt Giuca <matt.giuca@gmail.com> wrote:
Say I have taken a series of 10 potentially incriminating photos, and my phone may be confiscated or destroyed at any moment. What I want is for all 10 photos to be sent at 1/8 size, followed immediately by them being sent at 1/4 size, then 1/2 size and finally at full size. So if I have enough time, all of the photos will be sent in full detail. But if I am interrupted, at least I will have transferred a low-resolution version of each photo. The total bandwidth is less than double the full photo size.
Yes, it would probably be best to have configuration options for what resolutions and JPEG compression parameters are to be used for each round of transfers. Once the code is written for sending reduced size pictures in the background it will be easy to have the exact sizes be a configuration option.
Also, at risk of being yelled at for suggesting proprietary technology, I feel I should mention that the Google+ app has this feature. (Not the progressive resolution feature, but the automatic uploads.) You can set it so that every photo you take on the phone is automatically uploaded to a special Google+ album that is private to only you, and from there, you can choose to download or publish the photos. It's pretty cool, but obviously we would prefer a free software solution.
Google+ is a good idea for something to use right now. But one of the long- term issues with it is that you can be compelled to remove pictures as the same password is used for uploading and deleting. I don't think we can rely on people mirroring pictures from Google+. As an aside, is there a good way of mirroring pictures from someone else's Google+ page via a cron job? One advantage of FTP is that it's a standard feature of Anonymous FTP that the person uploading a file can't delete it. So if I uploaded some pictures to a server in the US run by a US resident and citizen who has similar ideas to me and a condition of upload was that copyright was assigned as part of the upload process then no form of coercion that might be applied to me could result in the pictures being removed and no form of Australian legal action could result in the pictures being taken down (the US has more freedom of speech and less regard for foreign laws than most countries). Once pictures are on a Unix filesystem somewhere it's easy to mirror them. For anything that's really worth photographing you want the pictures to be stored in at least two foreign jurisdictions in the posession of people who won't cooperate with authorities. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/