Posts Tagged ‘thumbnail images’
May 6th, 2009 | 
Author: An image crawl is a nice way to display a selection of thumbnail images without resorting to a big table that takes up most of the page. Ideal for sites that have a lot of images, such as those offering photography or graphic design services, or for those where the appearance of the product is a major selling point, as with jewelry sites, these crawls are a simple way to add some animation and interactivity.
An image crawl basically works as follows: you have a selection of thumbnails (photographs you’ve shot, pieces of jewelry you’re selling, etc) that go across the screen either vertically or horizontally. Those images move slowly across the screen, allowing a viewer to browse the images. Typically, the crawl will be set up with links, so that when the viewer clicks an image, it will go to a larger view of the photograph, the jewelry piece’s purchase page, or the like.
These functions have their weaknesses, as well as options that can minimize and mitigate them. Generally, image crawls are made to move fairly slowly, making them poor choices for getting people to the product they need. Image crawls should not generally be used as a main store display. Rather, they are a supplemental display intended to give a look at the products offered or the website owner’s photography, graphics, and other work, as well as the ability to go to the actual jewelry piece, photo, design, or other item that catches a user’s eye. Since image crawls take up much less space than a typical catalog section, they are great for placing on every page of a site, keeping the products at the forefront of the visitor’s attention.
Image crawls are also often made up of several images. This can result in a high loading time, even with tiny thumbnails. Using pre-sized thumbnail images is a must; not only will quality suffer drastically if you simply set the width and height properties of a full-size image to thumbnail size, but this will not actually reduce the size of the image being downloaded. Even then, you want to keep the number of images to a manageable size. You don’t want the entirety of a large jewelry database to be appearing, for example. Good solutions are to choose specific featured images, or, if you want every image to potentially display, use a random selection from a database with a limit. This can be particularly effective if the images show up on different pages, giving a visitor a new selection each time they change the page. Other options include displaying only from a page-appropriate (or random) category. One final note regarding the difficulties of image number: if you have a lot of images in your crawl, and especially if your crawl appears on every page of the site, your “hits” will skyrocket. Moreso than ever, visitors should be your primary stat to look at if you want accurate statistics (or, as accurate as they get on the web).
Although those are the most notable weaknesses of image crawls, there are also some potential pitfalls that one should be aware of when creating them, and methods of coding that will minimize the impact of such problems. I discuss these in the next article on the details of image crawls.
Dustin Schwerman is the head web designer for Truly Unique Website Design. Truly Unique works on websites of all varieties; their clients may offer products and services ranging from religious jewelry to glamour photography.
Article Source: The Details of Image Crawls 1
To obtain fast loading web images users often need to crop their pictures to fit the rules imposed by webmasters to speed up their website. Images used nowadays have often a very high resolution and loading them takes a huge amount of time. This is why webmasters usually restricts their dimensions and require the user to crop their image to ensure its fast loading. This calls for a picture crop tool – and although there are several online image crop scripts available – the most efficient and complete solution is offered by Kroppr.
Installed on your domain, it will allow your visitors to rotate, zoom and crop images in real time without extra load on your server.
The utility of Kroppr goes beyond the mere functionality of an image rotation crop script like “wallpaper resize and rotate script”. It is extremely user-friendly and it does NOT require any additional plug-ins (such as Java or Flash) for rotating images. While many other online image crop scripts are difficult to use due to the limitations of their interfaces, Kroppr uses slides to help the user resize and zoom the image. Rotating the image, or just a part of it, is also a very user-friendly operation due to its visual approach. This is why Kroppr is perceived as a usable avatar or wallpaper maker, helping users to manipulate images in order to create avatars, wallpapers, calendars, postcards, etc.
The dimension of the images is not a problem while using Kroppr because the script adapts itself to the image size. It is also useful when working with small thumbnail images that link to bigger images because the script will crop and resize the big image and not the thumbnail, allowing you to obtain a high quality result. Although it’s an online image crop tool, Kroppr allows you to save the resulted image to your hard drive for later use. It also allows you to reset all the changes and start cropping again.
One of the biggest advantage of using Kroppr as your image rotation crop script consists in the simplicity of its installation. The graphic tools needed for it to run properly are already installed on any common hosting server so there is no need to pay extra to allow Kroppr to run on your domain. Depending on the graphical packages installed on your server (ImageMagic, NetPBM, RSVG or GD2), this crop script will always choose the best solution that will ensure the quality of the resulted image and a minimal server load. All these advantages will transform picture cropping into a simple and fun operation that can be performed by any website visitor.
Forget about complicated and difficult to install picture crop tools! Allow your users to manipulate images on your website while guaranteeing the fun and simplicity of the operations required
Find out more about Kroppr – the online cropping tool for your website – by playing with our demo script here.
Article Source: Kroppr – online image cropping tool for your website