With respect to the Zope Photo product, thank all
of you for your suggestions and bug reports. All of your suggestions, including
customizable default displays, are now part of the Photo and ZPhotoAlbum
product. You can find the latest beta version at http://www.zope.org/Member/Drew/Photo.
Also, I now have ZPhotoAlbum working on a production site. http://www.jpdesserts.com. As always, I
welcome your further suggestions.
Just before this last release, I did some
experimentation with PIL vs. other open source image manipulation tools. PIL
seems to have two negative effects when resizing. First, moire artifacts are
subtle, but apparent. Second, the scan that PIL does introduces some blur, as do
all scaling tools, but PIL does a lackluster job of applying a sharpening filter
after a resize. The net effect is that images resized by the Photo product are
not nearly as good as those done by Imagemagick. Additionally, Imagemagick has
several features that would be nice to include with Photo, but would not be
available with PIL. Foremost is support for FlashPix, which several of you have
requested. The downside is that Imagemagick is slower. Interfacing with
Imagemagick would be done through the command line, so the PIL libraries would
not be needed by Photo, but the Imagemagick "convert" program would have to be
available in the path of the user that runs Zope. The swig and native python
interfaces to Imagemagick are a bit immature, and we really only need image
manipulation during upload, so the command line interface won't have too much
downside. Moreover, I think Photo would be easier to install, because the broken
product syndrome that comes with installing PIL would not occur. That is a good
summary of the issues.
Before converting Photo over to Imagemagick, I want
to get your input. I see much more positive than negative, but I want to be sure
that I have the whole picture.
The upside of all of this is that I now know more
about online digital imagery than I ever wanted to know. I want to put the
ZPhotoAlbum product behind me, but I also want the highest quality for my
websites. Your opinion really matters, so please take a minute and send me your
impressions. Thanks for your support.
"Drew"