Keep the Raws Coming

Our friendly neighborhood @LebedevRI pointed out to me a little while ago that we had reached some nice milestones for https://raw.pixls.us. Not surprisingly I had spaced out and not written anything about it (or really any sort of social posts). Bad Pat!

So let’s talk about raw.pixls.us (RPU) a bit!

Recap

For anyone not familiar with RPU, a quick recap (we had previously written about raw.pixls.us earlier this year). There used to be a website for housing a repository of raw files for as many digital cameras as possible called rawsamples.ch. It was created by Jakob Rohrbach and had been running since March of 2007. Back in 2016 the site was hit with a SQL injection attack that left the Joomla database corrupted (in a teachable moment, the site also didn’t have a database backup).

With the rawsamples.ch site down, @LebedevRI and @andabata worked to get a replacement option in-place and working: https://raw.pixls.us!

Sexy Stats

We grabbed all the files we could salvage from rawsamples.ch and @andabata setup the new page. We’ve had a slowly growing response as folks have filled in gaps for camera models we still don’t have.

For reference, we currently have unique cameras, and unique samples.

Moar samples!

As @LebedevRI has said, we still really need folks to check RPU and send us more samples!

• We currently only have about 77% coverage.
• We want to replace any non-CC0 (public domain) samples with CC0 licensed samples.
• We are still missing some rarer samples like any medium-format or Sigma samples.

Our hope is that some casual reader out there might look at the list and say “Hey! I’ve got that camera lying around - let me submit a sample!”.

Here’s the current list of missing camera samples:

If you have any of the cameras on this list and don’t mind spending a few minutes uploading a sample file, we would be very grateful for the help!

Don’t forget that we are looking for:

• Lens mounted on the camera, cap off
• Image in focus and properly exposed
• Landscape orientation

and we are not looking for:

• Series of images with different ISO, aperture, shutter, wb, lighting, or different lenses
• DNG files created with Adobe DNG Converter
• Photographs of people, for legal reasons.

If you don’t see your camera on this list, you’re not off the hook yet! We are also looking for files that are licensed very freely…

Non Creative-Commons Zero (CC0)

We have many raw samples that were not licensed as freely as we would like. Ideally we are looking for images that have been released Creative Commons Zero (CC0). This list is all samples we already have that are not licensed CC0, so if you happen to have one of the cameras listed below please consider uploading some new samples for us!

We are really working hard to make sure we are a good resource of freely available raw samples for all Free Software imaging projects to use. Thank you so much for helping out if you can!