Support the offline pre-processing of tiles and later integration into the site

Thanks for your suggestion. I'll work on it soon.

Here is some food for thought.
Talks about the storage of tiles within an archive to conserve inodes at the expense of cpu.
http://www.nabble.com/krpano-and-tiles-in-ZIP-files-td23826325.html

I committed an implementation of this feature. I'd be happy if someone could try it.

Here's how it works:
* In Zoomify settings, select "Tiling backend" = None. Your PHP installation must have the Zip extension loaded for this to work
* Upload a new image => nothing happens
* Create your own tiles and package the folder in a Zip file. Make sure that ImageProperties.xml is included in the archive
* Edit the image above and upload the Zip file in the "Zoomify tiles" area
* The Zip contents should be extracted and properly placed by Zoomify

Note that you can also upload a new image and the Zip file simultaneously.

I thought I'd give it a test run this morning.

I scanned in a Noblex 120 film frame at 4800 dpi 16 bit and generated a 1.27 gig image file. converted it down to 8 bit, 570 meg. Then I zoomified that directly out of CS3. This yielded 4316 files in 17 folders 47 meg. I zipped it up reducing the size by 1%. Then I downsized the base image to 1743x400 and uploaded both the archive and the file to my site. Had no problems.

Works just fine. I was a bit worried that unzipping a big file myght run into another memory limit but I have not hit one yet.

This is a pretty big file. I'm not sure that you would need to use a bigger one unless you were trying to deal with a gigapixel image. I will continue to test this out. I'm going to scan in some large format 4x5 images and perhaps load some of my large composite images. I have a 75 frame composit image of Tulsa and a 135 frame composit image of the Oklahoma State capital I could upload.

I am amazed at how quickly you fixed this up. As it is at the heart of my site - i appreciate it.

Now if I can only figure out how to make the viewer background black to match the site. But I think that is a trivial thing just a matter of the zoomify variables.

Thanks for your work

I tested the flash variables too and they work.

Unfortunately they are implements as global values. This not appropriate for all images. While some photographers produce images with a consistent aspect ratio it's not necessary and I don't. Basically, I use what ever aspect ration fits the scene. it can vary dramatically depending on the nature of the image. Panoramic images are usually between 2:1 and 20:1 in aspect ratio although you can have a vertical panorama as with a skyscraper. A constant initial image start point is not reasonable when expressed in pixels and although you CAN simply set the images to "CENTER" the item of most interest might not BE in the center of ALL images. The best solution would be to set up a individual variable for both the initial x/y location and zoom for each image and a default variable if you do not add one. The same sort of thing needs to be done with max and min zoom. You may need to limit it on some images to avoid artifacts.

I can not crack the code to changing the viewer's background color -- I've kicked that back to Zoomify.

Bill Lea

Thanks Bill for your feedback. Please move the discussion about FlashVars to another issue as this one is only concerned with the offline processing of tiles.