Spy Photos

Big news on TV last night and in the papers this morning, the arrest of ten people in the USA on spy charges plus all the cloak and dagger world of passwords, message drops and being undercover. Yes, the photos too.
One of the people accused, according to The Times, sent messages back to Moscow inside otherwise open source images available on the internet. So today I’m sure someone will ask me how. The answer is complex and involves an awful lot of maths but it is perfectly possible. This field of mathematics is called steganography and I’m sure there are web sites somewhere that explain how it all works. We looked at it some years ago as a way of embedding data inside an image to enable copyright owners to prove, without doubt, that any given image was “theirs”. We dropped it as there were more manageable ways of achieving the same end.
If you’re tempted to add data to an image (but not encrypted to spy standards) just get to grips with metadata, you can easily add date, place, subject data and even a few personal comments.

Historypin

It’s a couple of weeks since the launch of Historypin, and our role as photo scanning partner. I’ve been following the publicity Google / We Are What We Do have been getting for this venture.
The response on dozens of blogs has been universally positive, exciting many people imagination about the role of photos to bring people together across generations. Many of these blogs have been by UK publishers but there has been significant interest from around the world.
Historypin prompted a lively debate in Australia about privacy, with many positive ideas about how good the concept is. But consistently people want more photos on the site. Well, the answer is in our own hands - put your photos on the site or better still send them to us so we can scan them for you.

Apple TV and Scanning

I’ll admit photo scanning is fundamentally dull. We scan photos all day and its only music that keeps us sane. Which is a shame because photos - scanned or otherwise - are such a tremendous source of enjoyment. Music and scanned photos combined are a powerful combination.
Enter Apple TV. Connect it to your TV, log onto your home wireless network, fire up iTunes and very quickly you have a tremendous outlet for your scanned photos, digital images and your favourite music. Using a very simple interface you can look at any of your photo albums (folders on your PC) either on a photo-by-photo basis or by pressing one button, as a slideshow. You can link this to a music playlist in iTunes and in a few seconds a collection of photos on your computer appears as a fantastic display on your lounge TV. Quick, easy and brilliant resolution.
Apple TV also lets you watch internet movies from YouTube, listen to music from your iTunes library, and view videos you can rent from iTunes Music Store.

Yes we can scan glasss

Amazing phone call yesterday, someone has come into possession of a couple of thousand glass plates taken in the early part of last century. Which prompted the question - can we scan glass plate images?
Technically we can. For 35mm its quite common to get the slide sandwiched between two tiny sheets of glass. No problem scanning those. We can scan bigger images in glass but due to the problem with newtons rings we’d need to do a test first.

Historypin

It’s official - 1Scan is the photo scanning service for Historypin, a clever new photo sharing service jointly developed with Google.
Yesterday we were invited to the launch event. Around 200 people gathered at the Royal Institution in London for talks about the service and demonstrations after. We tried hard to resist clicking on the page that links to our site, but you can by clicking on the 1Scan photo scanning page.
We have some great postcards produced to publicise Historypin and we’ll be sending those out with scanned work.