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Cancel Cable: How Internet Pirates Get Free Stuff |
Chapter 12 – Pictures
A sampling of vintage and modern pictures that you can download:
- Album, CD, and DVD covers
- Art and architecture (fine and otherwise)
- Blueprints, designs, and plans
- Cartoon, comic, and anime characters
- Celebrities, models, and naked people
- Family trips
- Games and athletes
- Graphics and icons
- Landscapes, seascapes, wildlife, and undersea life
- Maps, signs, and symbols
- Optical illusions
- Outer space
- Posters, ads, and logos
- Railways, planes, and vehicles
- Stock art and photos
- Tattoo designs
- Wars and crime scenes
Torrent payloads range from single pictures to large stock and museum collections, representing the work of artists, illustrators, graphic designers, photographers, photojournalists, drafters, architects, and cartographers. Image quality ranges from small, low-resolution photos to oversized, high-res desktop backgrounds (wallpaper).
Image Formats
The most common image formats are JPEG (.jpg, .jpe, .jpeg), PNG (.png), TIFF (.tif, .tiff), and GIF (.gif). Bitmap or BMP (.bmp) images are rare because, unlike the preceding formats, they’re uncompressed and have large file sizes.
To view or organize image files in Windows, use Windows Photo Viewer or Windows Live Photo Gallery (the latter is a free download from Microsoft via Windows Update). In OS X, use Preview or iPhoto. Third-party image managers like Picasa 
are available; read Wikipedia’s list of image organizers . The hardware players listed in “Media Players” in Chapter 11 can run slideshows on your TV.
Other formats include Adobe Photoshop (.psd) and Illustrator (.ai). An Encapsulated PostScript or EPS (.eps) file can be placed in professional design programs like those from Adobe and QuarkXPress. Some picture collections come as PDF (.pdf) documents (see “PDF Files” in Chapter 14).
If you download a picture in an unfamiliar format, search fileinfo.com for the filename extension or read Wikipedia’s article about image file formats . To associate a particular image type with a specific program, see Chapter 3.