panoramas

winnjewett

Smugmug does a lot of things very well. Panoramas are not its strong point.
Here is one photo that illustrates smugmug's shortfalls:
http://brilliantphoton.smugmug.com/gallery/467385/1/18923578/Large

The limited width of the large photo size simply does not allow for enough detail to be seen in a photo with a large aspect ratio.

There are several ways to display panoramas very well. Here is one way that works:

http://brilliantphoton.com/zoomify/rainbow/

There are a lot of people who have very large files (the rainbow shot above is a small panorama at 32 megapixels). But the point really isn't about total size, it's about the ratio. Perhaps the smugmug team could start thinking of a solution that would meet the needs of photographers who shoot wide ratio photos.

Thanks,
Winn

rainforest1155

That's why I currently work with special fitted originals. I resize my pictures to a common height like 650px and upload them telling the people to view them in orginial size for more details. They have then the horizontal scroll bar of their browser to view the full width if they wish to. Works quite well for very wide pictures except for many people don't bother viewing it big - they just like the impact of the whole picture even though it's just a small stripe by design of our monitors.
I had the idea of including a java applet to do the same you want with the flash thingy of yours. Haven't had time to pursuit it further, yet. Hopefully I'll get to it sometimes.
In the meantime you can also have a look at my panorama gallery on my page under landscapes to see how I'm currently dealing with it, if you like.

Sebastian

Andy

winnjewett wrote:

Perhaps the smugmug team could start thinking of a solution that would meet the needs of photographers who shoot wide ratio photos.

Winn, thanks as always, for laying it straight on us. Could you elaborate and perhaps be more specific? What sizes or ratios would you like to be able to display? What would you like the behavior to do?

winnjewett

Andy wrote:

Winn, thanks as always, for laying it straight on us. Could you elaborate and perhaps be more specific? What sizes or ratios would you like to be able to display? What would you like the behavior to do?

I will first reply to Sebastian's post. While the smaller original might functionally work for display, it does not give the photographer the option of selling his print. I guess that opens up a whole other can of worms. The only way to properly print a wide panorama is with the variable length/fixed height sizes that are offered by ezprints.

As for the display of the images, I am sure that whatever solution the guys at smugmug came up with would be great. If I were given the power to make the decision, I would start with a new photo size called panorama that would only be created for a photo if it met certain aspect ratio requirements.

It is difficult to choose a width that would work well for all panoramas. So, I think I would actually pick a surface area to display. I think that an 800x600 pixel image contains a good amount of detail. So, I would choose 480,000 pixels to be the target. My photo 'tractor in the mist' shot above has a ratio of about 7.3:1. Using the formula: width=(total pixels / ratio)^0.5, I come up with an image that is 1,868 px by 257 px.


I think that using a system similar to this one would enhance the viewer's experience by allowing them to enjoy wide ratio photos in addition to regular photos with no additional bandwidth considerations to worry about since it would contain the same number of total pixels as the current large photo.

Even if the printing of panoramas is not possible, it would still be nice to be able to show panoramas without resizing and giving access to the original (which also negates some minor security protection).

What do you think?

-Winn

Andy

winnjewett wrote:

I will first reply to Sebastian's post. While the smaller original might functionally work for display, it does not give the photographer the option of selling his print. I guess that opens up a whole other can of worms. The only way to properly print a wide panorama is with the variable length/fixed height sizes that are offered by ezprints.

As for the display of the images, I am sure that whatever solution the guys at smugmug came up with would be great. If I were given the power to make the decision, I would start with a new photo size called panorama that would only be created for a photo if it met certain aspect ratio requirements.

It is difficult to choose a width that would work well for all panoramas. So, I think I would actually pick a surface area to display. I think that an 800x600 pixel image contains a good amount of detail. So, I would choose 480,000 pixels to be the target. My photo 'tractor in the mist' shot above has a ratio of about 7.3:1. Using the formula: width=(total pixels / ratio)^0.5, I come up with an image that is 1,868 px by 257 px.


I think that using a system similar to this one would enhance the viewer's experience by allowing them to enjoy wide ratio photos in addition to regular photos with no additional bandwidth considerations to worry about since it would contain the same number of total pixels as the current large photo.

Even if the printing of panoramas is not possible, it would still be nice to be able to show panoramas without resizing and giving access to the original (which also negates some minor security protection).

What do you think?

-Winn

Thanks Winn. How about some links in the caption to 100pct crops, say 800px by 800px?

MrBook2

Panos need work...
I just want to add my 2 cents. I agree and wish that smugmug handled panos better. I can't really come up with a solution (or at least I can't come up with a solution that doesn't cause a lot of work for the poor guys coding it!) As an example of the problem, have a look at one of my photos hosted here at SM:

http://mrbook2.smugmug.com/photos/popup.mg?popUp=true&ImageID=9213540&Size=Large

This was a stitch of several 5 megapixel images, and the original size is actually 8603 x 1602. It is hard to see any of the detail in the image as displayed on SM. If I were to allow users to view the original size that wouldn't be the case, but there are many reasons the people might not want to do that.

The "Large" size image is 800 x 149, so it seems like the SM code is trying to make it fit inside a 800x600 image, making the largest dimension 800 pixels. What about allowing a pano toggle on a gallery, in which case it would fit the smallest dimension of the image to eithor 800 or 600, depending on the orientation of the image? I suspect that the large size limitation actually comes into play at upload time, when SM creates the smaller size images that it uses for display. The resampling algorithm most likely does the "fit-largest-dimension-into-800-by-600" trick. It may be completely intractable to change that behavior at this point.

--Aaron

Richard

Andy wrote:

Thanks Winn. How about some links in the caption to 100pct crops, say 800px by 800px?

clap Brilliant solution. I didn't know you could put HTML in captions, but I just did a test and it worked perfectly. For panoramas you could put whatever you like as the original (within the global size limits) in a private gallery then link to that from the caption.

Cheers,

Andy

rsinmadrid wrote:

clap Brilliant solution. I didn't know you could put HTML in captions, but I just did a test and it worked perfectly. For panoramas you could put whatever you like as the original (within the global size limits) in a private gallery then link to that from the caption.

Cheers,

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