Image Processing

GroupServer has far better image handling, thanks to Steven Clift,
e-Democracy.org,
  http://e-democracy.org/
and Advanced Business Education Limited.

Images, such as the one below, are now displayed on a Web page, rather than
being treated like any other file. The page shows a scaled  image, so you can
look at it without having to download the full image, which can be quite large.
The image-page also links to the other images in a topic, so you can view, say,
the evolution of an interface from design to implementation.
  http://groupserver.org/r/img/1101-2008-06-24T030606Z
The image-page is linked to from email messages, the view of the post on the
Web, and from file searches
  http://groupserver.org/s/index.html?t=0&f=1
The view of a post also has a thumbnail of the image to the left of the link to
the image page.

The images are resized by the Python Imaging Library (PIL)
  http://www.pythonware.com/products/pil/
Richard did the hard-yards integrating PIL with GroupServer, with what is our
first component to only rely on Zope 3. The same code that resizes the images
that are posted to groups also resizes the peoples profile images, so the
uploading code can be far more tolerant of oddly sized profile-images.

The following file was added to this topic:

  daffs.jpg (3247KB)

I have updated the image page. The old page is shown in old.png
while the new page is shown in new.png below.

The changes are small, but I think they improve the page.

 * I removed the context menu. I do think that the page can do without
   the context menu, as there are plenty of other navigation elements.

 * I removed the name of the person who posted the image from the
   title. The name tended to make the title long, and this made the
   title ugly.

 * I replaced the link-box with the Share Bar. Now images, posts, and
   topics use the same mechanism for sharing.

 * The image is bigger. I know the *point* of the page is to show a
   smaller image. However, even the bigger image is still smaller than
   the jQuery module ☺  I plan to tweak the code that scales the images
   to increase the JPEG compression. This will save a lot of bandwidth.

 * The link to the full-sized image is at the bottom of the page,
   rather than in the metadata. This makes more sense, as it is not
   really metadata.

 * The photo of the person who posted the image is now on the right. I
   think this is better because it places the metadata closer to the
   image.

 * The metadata text is now wider.

 * The metadata has been put onto more lines, with the group explicitly
   labeled.

 * The order of the metadata lines have been tweaked. The lines now go
   Author, File, Topic, Group, Date.

I have not thought about how these changes relate to the layout of a
post, and topic. Maybe the metadata for images will be moved over to
the left, to match posts. Maybe the metadata for posts will be the ones
to move. Maybe neither I do not know ☺

The following files were added to this topic:

  old.png (614KB)

  new.png (482KB)