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Zoom/Pan feature request

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Member
Registered: Aug 2008
Posts: 17
How about a feature that lets you zoom in on a picture and and pan around on it, similar to how google maps works. So when you are looking at a picture you can zoom in and use the mouse to pan (scroll) around the enlarged version (or if that's too tricky the old fashioned manual method of clicking on arrows.

I don't know if the GD has a decent enlarge/scale function or if using a third high resolution picture would be required.

It would allow for better online virtual tours of the vehicles, especially interior shots
Administrator
Registered: Apr 2008
Posts: 324
The image does already zoom if you have a large picture and only a small browser window. I guess you want to be able to zoom in to examine vehicle details better though?

At first guess, I'd say it would be possible ... but it'd be quite tricky for you to take the photographs. You'd really need to take multiple overlapping shots at different distances. Alternatively, you'd need to use a very high resolution camera (although they're cheap these days). Uploading could be an issue - you'd really need to use FTP or similar.

It's something we'll consider though.
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AutoDirector administrator
Member
Registered: Aug 2008
Posts: 17
> "The image does already zoom if you have a large picture"

That is more of a panning feature, isn't it?

You are correct, the idea being to zoom in to see more detail.

I can't speak for how hard it would be for you to implement but conceptually it would just be like two levels of thumbnails (you already have the one level).

The user would take a high-resolution picture and the user could create a thumbnail of it (or your software could do it for them, although I would think you would get better results if done in photoshop).

This new second level thumbnail would be the regular photo you see when you click on the first thumbnail. If the viewer click on it you simply replace with a larger version of the photo and since you said it already does panning it's done :-)

In the interim I could probably do it myself if your software allowed the current picture to be clickable with a hyperlink (is that do-able?). If the person clicks on it, it opens the larger picture in a different viewing mechanism.
Administrator
Registered: Apr 2008
Posts: 324
I like the idea. Perhaps another option would be that you could identify areas of the photo which hyperlink to zoomed in versions.

Incidentally, the image does zoom and pan if it doesn't fit in the browser. If you have a massive image, you would get a great zooming effect, but it could take a while to download.
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AutoDirector administrator
Member
Registered: Aug 2008
Posts: 17
Here is a neat example of a live/interactive zoom/pan. Its a bit fancier but it's cool:

http://www.magictoolbox.com/magiczoom_examples/
Administrator
Registered: Apr 2008
Posts: 324
If you have a very large image, AutoDirector effectively works like the "internal zoom" example on that page.
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AutoDirector administrator

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