We’ve had our heads down for a while working on some SERIOUS BUSINESS, as well a new website, for a while now, but one of the projects we’ve been working on for months now made a debut on the internet today and we thought we should poke our heads up and let you know.
Today Adobe launched Photoshop Express an online, web app version of the venerable Photoshop. Except it’s cooler than that. Like it does more. Online stuff. Galleries. Hosting. Sharing. That sort of thing.
We’ve been working with Adobe on this for months now, and there’s more to come, but this marks the auspicious beginning of an extended friendship. Congratulations, Adobe, on your launch and thank you for being such a good partner.
And feel free to become a fan of this fine product on Facebook! The app is integrated with your facebook photos and can edit and stick them back in your album, which is seriously hot.
As I’ve been working on a project based around photographs, I’ve been giving some thought to the problem of allowing images to be viewed, but not downloaded. It’s really an inevitable issue, but I think the way photo licensing site GumGum handles this issue is quite interesting. They have a small flash file that is used for the sole purpose of load images into it. Having images loaded in this manner prevents a user’s browser from having direct access to the image. The second thing they do is create custom access policies for every image view. For instance, when you view an image of Angelina Jolie waving to the camera, unique access credentials are generated for that image that expire after 30 seconds. This gives the browser proper time to load the image into the flash file, but makes it inaccessible after 30 seconds. They’re using amazon s3 for storage which makes this technique of temporary credentials pretty simple and straightforward.
Sure you could just take a screenshot and trim the excess in photoshop, but I think these two steps would prevent the vast majority of interneters from downloading your content.
