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Photo Piece

Link to what you want
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When making a web page, you can put photos on your webpage that aren't in your server space. But you can only put in the whole photo (or so I have seen.)

This plug in however will change all of that. When you are linking to a picture you can also select what you want of that picture with out having to import it into a photo editor. Other computers will be instructed to open up that picture, via the plug in, and only display the coordinates you have selected.

Later versions, will be like the photo editors in that you shall be able to select different photos and place them in your finished works on different layers or with different filters added. The original picture will be unchanged and unharmed.

sartep, Mar 08 2004

Image fragments with CSS http://www.alistapa...m/articles/sprites/
from 'a list apart'. [st3f, Oct 04 2004, last modified Oct 05 2004]

[link]






       Hmm. This could lead to the originals, or master images, being tightly packed collages of images similar to the texture maps you'll find in console games where the textures for just about everything are packed into a single or very few small images to conserve texture memory. When the textures are called they include the coordinates of the exact map within the master image.   

       An interesting idea, sir.
bristolz, Mar 08 2004
  

       Wow, thank you very much. I hadn't even thought about games.
sartep, Mar 08 2004
  

       You wouldn't need a plug-in. Instead of referencing an image on a server, you call a server-side script with the parameters you need and the image fragment is passed to you, i.e. instead of:
<img src="image.jpg">
  

       you use:
<img src="photopiece.php? file=image.jpg& x1=125& y1=128& x2=201& y2=256& scale=1">
(spaces inserted to make this lay out better)
  

       It shouldn't take more than a few lines of php to create the image on the fly.
st3f, Mar 08 2004
  

       Well . . . in that case I take back everything.
bristolz, Mar 08 2004
  

       What? All of it?
st3f, Mar 08 2004
  

       //Well . . . in that case I take back everything.//   

       D'oh!   

       (serious note) Could you do the same with filters, and say non square outlines like say the lasso tool or would you still need my plug in?
sartep, Mar 08 2004
  

       Most server-side scripting languages are fairly complete programming languages. You can do pretty much anything with an image that you are able to program. Bear in mind that all this work is happening on your server so, if you want to do something complex instead of just chopping an image down to save bandwidth, you might want to find some way of pushing the processing back to the client.   

       As browsers aren't yet capable of altering the contents of a bitmap (I doubt it's even supported by the DOM yet) you'd be back to using a plug-in.
st3f, Mar 08 2004
  

       You can do this with CSS as well, but it is limited to four-sided outlines.
waugsqueke, Mar 08 2004
  

       "This could lead to the originals, or master images, being tightly packed collages of images..."
Would this be an improvement? Aside from this application, of what other use would this be?
phoenix, Jul 09 2004
  

       Fewer parts flying in close formation. Suppose you only had one image file to handle all of the graphic support elements of a site. Would that be better on the server/content management side? Would it be better on the client/cache side?
bristolz, Jul 09 2004
  

       How about this hack? Create two files in the same folder and use IE to view the later (j.htm)?   

       1) i.htm:   

       <html> <body> <img src="http://www.halfbakery.com/img/hc.gif" style="position:absolute;left: -50; top: -50; " /> </body> </html>   

       2) j.htm   

       <html> <body> <iframe frameborder=no src="i.htm" width=50 height=50 scrolling=no /> </body> </html>
Porsche911, Jul 09 2004
  

       Yeah. That works.
angel, Jul 09 2004
  

       "Fewer parts flying in close formation"
Yeah, but image management becomes tougher. Mess up the coordinates and you're going to have some confused users. Also, I presume image size and resolution remain the same as in a stand-alone graphic, so I don't see an improvement there.
phoenix, Jul 09 2004
  

       The improvement comes in the number of server accesses needed to fetch a page. If you have a page with 10 images, that's 11 fetches to the web server. If you bundle all the images together it's only two. That may speed things up a bit.   

       Another advantage is for image rollovers -- there is no need to make sure that the rollover images are preloaded, since they are a different part of an image that has already been displayed on the page.   

       Back when I thought you'd have to chop the image server-side, I wasn't that keen. Now that I know that you can do it client-side using CSS, I like this idea much more. I may even give it a go.
st3f, Jul 09 2004
  

       I really like this idea.   

       Even thought sartep wasn't the first with this idea (see link), I don't believe that the use of it in a web browser was well known at the time so I'm going to put my croissant back. [+]
st3f, Aug 09 2005
  

       great idea [sartep], server side cropping etc. is nice.
neilp, Aug 09 2005
  

       Thanks, yes I wanted it more like a server side photoshop, with more than just cropping but lasso, blurr and filters.
sartep, Aug 10 2005
  
      
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