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Themesicon: navigation pathPhoto/Byteicon: navigation pathArchive—post/photographic
 
 
 
 
 

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reconstructed in its entirety out of lossy-compressed images—and these include, for example, most customary JPEGs. [54] Thus the supposed absolutely loss-free character of digital reproduction, inasmuch as a given amount of numbers would only have to be rewritten in order to produce the exact same image, breaks on the pragmatics of digital image archives. For commercial image suppliers in the Internet, small, low-resolution images (‹thumbnails›) often serve as a kind of index which refers to the higher-resolution ‹originals,› which can only be obtained for payment and are protected against unauthorized reproduction through digital watermarks. [55] It is obvious that the distinction between original and copy, which is occasionally declared to be obsolete, also turns up again in the realm of digital reproduction—and along with it all of the problems associated with the ownership of images or with copyright (see below).

Intermediality/Rearranging the archive

Due to digitalization, different symbolic material (photographs, paintings, moving images, writing, sounds, measurement data, etc.) exists side by side in

 

the same archive, which means that there is a trend towards the dissolution of traditional boundaries between the different media and thus of the academic disciplines assigned to them (see below). While a traditional photograph is a relatively isolated object, one has to regard a digitalized photo as one element out of many in an intermedial link context (for example on a Web site). [56] A future archiving of digital information must therefore achieve more than just the adaptation to ever new data formats, etc. Rather, the contexts of specific information also have to be placed into the archive. [57]

New forms of addressing images correspond with this intermediality of the digitalized archive, because «in contrast to analog media, digital media are not only capable of storing, but also sorting and searching.» [58] That means that the arrangement of the image archive according to artist's names, epochs or other forms of assigning keywords could make way for new orders that, for example, are based on a certain similarity of images—beyond the human eye—through automatic image analysis, [59] which is already relevant today for face recognition and thus controlling access to

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