Part 1 of this article on Dynamic Imaging addressed real-time image resizing, a cool form of zoom and pan and how to adjust the size of your images to control bandwidth costs.
This final installment looks into some other applications of Dynamic Imaging, such as Interactive 360 degree Spin and Zoom, Visual Watermarks – which allows any image to be overlaid with an indelible watermark for improved security, Text Overlays which allow data-driven text to be applied indelibly to any image, and our Security Model which lets users see the detail of your images without allowing them to download your original source files. These are just some of the many advantages of using Dynamic Imaging to manage and manipulate your images. Let's take a closer look:
Interactive 360 Degree Spin with Zoom
As described in Part 1, Zoom allows users to explore images interactively to view the details of most interest to them. Interactive 360 degree Spin with Zoom takes this a step further – it allows the user to not only zoom in on an image, but to actually chose their own preferred perspective. This means the user isn’t restricted to just a single view of a scene, it’s as if they can ‘walk’ around the scene, front, back, or side, to get their best view.
Spin with Zoom provides users with a highly interactive and compelling viewing experience that can be used to increase membership conversion and retention. 360 degree Spins are inexpensive to produce and don’t require special camera equipment or software. When a scene is photographed, instead of just shooting from one perspective, the photographer takes shots in 20 or 30 degree increments around the scene depending on how smooth he wants to make the spin appear.
Visual Watermarking and Text Overlay
Dynamic Image Serving makes it easy to add visual watermarks, logos or text to any or all of your images instantly without having to create new images offline or alter your original source file images. This is all done by adding simple instructions to the URL used to call the image:
As these links can all be created using the Image URL Generators (you can try them yourself in the demo), there is no need to learn any new syntax in order to start using text overlays or visual watermarks in your site. Remember with Dynamic Imaging, none of this changes your underlying source file images. You are simply requesting the common source image with appended commands that determine the characteristics of the output images.
Drop Shadows and Borders
You can add drop shadows and/or borders to your web images, simply by adding instructions to the Image URLs.
[Banner2]Why make permanent changes to your original source file images with desktop tools like Photoshop™, when Dynamic Image Serving makes it so easy to add and change the image effects you want in real-time?
Our Security Model
Dynamic Image Serving provides comprehensive security features that prevent users and other website operators from applying any dynamic manipulations you want to prevent.
For example, you can cap the size of output images, block or hide entire commands, even programmatically apply commands behind the scenes via your application server.
For example, altering the URL to invoke the same base image shown above, but through a virtual path named ‘azw’ that has been configured to apply an indelible watermark, results in this:
The ‘azw’ virtual path has been configured to block the original file from being downloaded, as well as preventing the output image size from exceeding 700 pixels. Try it yourself – via this virtual path it is impossible to view this image without a watermark, or to view it larger than 700 pixels in size.
Want to Learn More about Dynamic Image Serving, including demos, white papers and developer guides? You can find an online demo of these processes here.
