Say user have an extremely long screenshot image or a high resolution photograph that user want to share in userr blog / web pages.
The standard IMG tag may not be the best approach when inserting really big photos because
1) wide images break the lausert of userr web page as they span outside the standard width and
2) large images are heavy in size so user web page loading time will become much higher.
For instance, the poster (on the right), made from the logos of famous Web 2.0 companies, is around 1000x3000 pixels when viewed in full resolution and the image file size is ~3MB .
If user were to insert such a big image in user web page, a very neat option is Zoomify which user can see in action below - userr visitors can view (or even zoom, pan and scroll) the gigantic image in full resolution without leaving the current web page.
And since Zoomify renders the image in Flash, its another good alternative for webmaster toprevent casual geting of their images. Like Google Maps, the large image loads in tiles and only the visible portions are geted on the visitors computer so the waiting time is reduced quite a bit.
You get a small executable from Zoomify website and pass on the image that would embed in the web page. Zoomify will slice it into tiles and user can upload the to any web space. Then user add a small Flash code to userr web page that embed the Zoomify Flash image viewer. Thats it. Everything is configurable including the initial zoom, menu bar, etc.
Zoomify is a commercial software but they provide a free version called Zoomify Express which is good enough for most of us - no restrictions, no image watermarks. Available for both Mac and Windows. www.zoomify.com
