Comic Life

FotoTagger is not the only tool that lets users place texts over images. There're plenty of programs that allow you to do that. One of them is Comic Life, a software for creating comics. So what is the difference? It's in the goals you want to reach. If you want to publish a professionally looking comic book or add nice looking baloons with text to your travel photos, go for Comic Life. It's really good. If you need to use text placed over the image for better image search, then think about FotoTagger.

Comic Life is a tool for creating comic books by using your own images as panels. You define a layout, put images on a page, and add different text bubble designs. For example, you may choose a design to express thoughts, exclamations or whatsoever that you usually see in comics. You can also apply various filters to the images to make them look, for example, printed, hand-drawn or painted.

When you're done, you can export your comics to JPEG, HTML, QuickTime slide show or even to iPhoto album. You may also print it and give your friends your comic books. Unfortunately for PC users, Comic Life is not for them. ItвЂ™s a Mac tool. But for Mac users a product that got the Apple Design Award is a boon.

Here you can find some examples of what can be done with Comic Life:

As Comic Life lets you label photos, can it be considered a FotoTagger competitor? I don't think so. Although both products can have similar applications, such as creating visual tutorials and labeling who is who in family photos, they pursue different goals. The Comic Life goal is to provide you with a nice, easy tool for adding texts on images to make fun and then share them through the Web. The FotoTagger goals seem to be wider because we are developing FotoTagger with our main ambition in mind: build a Web of annotated photos that is the Web where all photos are annotated.

Just picture this scenario: you need to find a photo of the Buckingham Palace along with a story about this famous place. In Google, you type вЂњbuckingham palaceвЂќ and get a long list of the relevant pictures. However, each photo is delivered to you not just as a piece of visual content. You see it annotated which means facts about the Palace and parts of this beautiful building are shown directly on the photo.

Probably, something like this:

Or like this:

Annotations are displayed as an overlay so you can turn them off at any time to enjoy the original view which is never spoiled. You may download the photo to a hard disk, send to a friend, or put to your blog. Annotations will be still there, easy-to-hide, available to everyone. Think of them as records on a back side of a paper photo. Wherever you send the picture, people can see them.

While people can enjoy the annotations to learn more about subjects visualized on the photo, search engines use annotations for better indexing. Now not only a photoвЂ™s file name or text which appears around the picture matters, but every object within the photo can be indexed individually. When a particular object is found on the photo, it is highlighted in the same way as Google highlights textual fragments in a found document.

For example, looking for the Green Drawing Room brings you the following result:

Having all photos in the Web annotated lets search engines get more information about content within pictures. It means more precise search and an ability to get more information about objects found on the image.

How can it be done? The primary task is to label photos in a way that lets:

Identifying any individual object on a photo, including people, buildings, natural creatures, and places.
Recognizing to each object exactly a specific label refers.
Storing annotations together with photos wherever they are located or moved.
Making labels available to standard search engines, such as Google, Yahoo and MSN regardless of where a photo is published вЂ“ on a personal site, blog or photo hosting service.
Keeping the original pure view of the image always available.

While Comic Life successfully solves the first three tasks, its texts are either stored in a proprietary format before exporting to JPEG or become an integrated part of the images so they cannot be used for search. FotoTagger stores annotations in an open XML-based format embedded into a usual JPEG. Within JPEG, annotation data are separated from image data so annotations can be shown or hidden in a click of a button.

The annotations are already with the photo so it does not matter where the image is located in the Web, on a personal site, photo hosting service or blog. When a search engine finds an image, it also finds annotations about content within the image. This format which we call FotoML is potentially available to any search engine, including Google, Yahoo, and MSN that can make their search crawlers recognize annotations embedded into a JPEG file.

This is actually what makes the difference. Comic Life is a really nice tool for creating comics. If you want to publish a professionally looking comic book, go for it. If you need to use text placed over the image for better image search, then think about FotoTagger.

By the way, FotoTagger Desktop, a tool for annotating content within images is free. You can download it from here.

Posted on February 14, 2007 by Alex Masycheff

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