[Dspace-general] RE: [Dspace-devel] Image Handling in DSpace

[Stuve, David H]

Hi Scott,

I've got some suggestions for you when implementing thumbnails in search
and browses.

For thumbnail size, I'd use the parameters in dspace.cfg for
thumbnail.maxwidth and
thubmnail.maxheight.  Those two parameters define the bounding box for
thumbnails in
the item view, and you may as well use them.  If you want thumbnails in
the browse to
be a different size (which makes sense,) I'd add parameters for
browse.thumbnail.maxwidth
and height, since I can easily see a site where they want big thumbnails
for item view and
smaller ones for the browse view.  I wouldn't bother generating two sets
of thubmnails, I
would just generate the item view images and rely on HTML and the web
browser to scale
them to the search/browse size.

Searching is very simple - eventually you get a page's worth of handles
and those get
instantiated into real items to fetch the titles, authors, dates, etc.
You only have
to add the code to fetch and display the item's thumbnails.

Browsing is a bit tougher - for speed the items are never instantiated.
You'll get a page
worth of item IDs/handles, and the browse text is fetched from a
database table.  The best way
to use the thumbnails the mediafilter generates is to then instantiate
those items and fetch
their thumbnail images for display.

Good luck, and let me know if you need any more advice!

Dave


-----Original Message-----
From: dspace-devel-admin at lists.sourceforge.net
[mailto:dspace-devel-admin at lists.sourceforge.net] On Behalf Of Scott
Yeadon
Sent: Monday, August 30, 2004 6:12 PM
To: dspace-general at MIT.EDU; dspace-tech at lists.sourceforge.net;
dspace-devel at lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: [Dspace-devel] Image Handling in DSpace


Hello,

I just wanted to get an idea of whether the DSpace community is 
interested in a patch to be included in a later version of DSpace to 
show image thumbnails in the title browse and search results pages where

items are comprised of (an) image bitstream(s). I've seen mention of it 
a couple of times and while we have done this locally, I want to 
refactor the code we've done to make it compatible with the mediafilter 
model of 1.2. If people are interested, post to the list with any 
ideas/thoughts/features regarding image handling and I'll start looking 
into a patch.

Also, are people interested in the option of a larger image display to 
be shown on the item display page? For an example of this have a look at

some image items on the ANU DSpace at http://dspace.anu.edu.au/. While 
we use some (inexpensive) commercial software to do this for performance

reasons (ImageAlchemy http://www.handmadesw.com/), if there is enough 
interest a version using free software such as ImageMagick or the java 
image libraries could be an alternative implementation (though the 
generation process is likely to be much slower).

Note the following:
- Local concerns may on occasion take priority so I'll do the work in 
stages e.g. 1) basic thumbnail viewing 2) item level images 3) 
additional generators/greater control over images, etc. This way I can 
added functionality incrementally fairly quickly
- Image options will be repository wide (i.e. thumbnails will be shown 
on a repository basis), if there is demand for per collection basis that

may come later
- Where an item comprises multiple image bitstreams only the first will 
be shown

Anyhow let me know any thoughts/requirements and I'll start looking into

it...

Thanks.

Scott.


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