Image editing in Numista

Hello,

In an effort to enhance the visual appeal of the catalog, I often improve the images of items by straightening them if they're not aligned, cropping them better, or adjusting the brightness when they're too dark. To do this, I have to download the images and use the Windows photo editor or GIMP, which is very time-consuming.

What I propose is to include the ability to edit images directly within Numista using a simple editor with a few tools:

• Crop (square and round)
• Straighten (also horizontal and vertical if the photo is not taken right on top)
• Brightness
• Contrast

For cropping the edges around the item (ellipse), I've noticed that this is a problem for many new members. We could implement this directly on Numista to streamline the process and save time. We could envision an automatic tool that crops the images and adds a white background, similar to what PIXLR does. Sometimes, the automatic tool might not be entirely satisfactory depending on the image quality, so we should retain the option to do it manually, as with GIMP.

I agree with the first part of this proposal

EXCEPT by experiment (see my profile) for Brightness and Contrast which lead to refusals justified by:

# pictured coin is in real color. no need to make better but fake colors

# The coin seems to be cleaned after your modification, it is better to leave the coin in its original appearance

# sorry but I refuse all photos which no longer correspond to their original appearance

# sorry, with your "'improvement'" this is no longer the coin I have in front of me

As for the use of an external site, this is the exclusive responsibility of the author of the photos.
you must carefully read their General Conditions of Use to know that if they say they do not keep them they can communicate them to one of their partners who also have partners.
They do not ask for copyright and only have the IP address of the person who provides them with the photos.

ps : I also use GIMP and as a member of Numista it remains internal

It's all a matter of balance, of course. It shouldn't alter the original appearance of the coin but should enhance it if the brightness is too low.

Free circular and rectangular cropping might be attainable but to get non-awful pictures with perspective cropping it can take quite some computing, depending on the resolution. But many users would probably still do a worse job than our volunteer crop squad with dedicated software and when you want to do a better job later you might end up having only access to an already worse quality source. 

What I would like to see is the possibility to rotate an image but this could also lead to loss of quality depending on the methods used.

Even many from the crop squad don't do it (maybe they see it as unnecessary or as mentioned don't want to lose quality).

"by changing socks we should get clean feet"

Basteros

It's all a matter of balance, of course. It shouldn't alter the original appearance of the coin but should enhance it if the brightness is too low.

Rather than adjusting the brightness or contrast of an image, which can remove some image data and artificially alter the colour - not desirable for a picture, especially one of a banknote, I think it would be preferable to adjust the colour balance and exposure levels of the image. Such a change would be non destructive and reversible. 

Don't forget to increase the resolution for more details

If it's too complicated to add the other features, just straightening an image directly from numista would be very useful.