Here is a long discussion on the PIL/Imagemagick issue for Photo and ZPhotoAlbum, if you are interested. Input is still needed. Drew Jochen Haeberle <Jochen@Haeberle.net> said:
At 16:57 Uhr +0000 08.02.2000, Andrew Lahser wrote:
- FlashPix would be a great Plus for me, too, but I think there is more to LivePicture Server than just the FileFormat!
You are correct, but it would be possible to write the FlashPix files to a directory on the LivePicture server. Since I don't have LivePicture and don't plan on it, it would be up to somebody else go get done. Yet, they would only have to extend Photo, this shouldn't be much trouble.
Is there no possibility in adding the most important features of the LivePicture Server to Photo, namely the zooming and scrolling in a defined area?
Ok. This is possible, but possibly complex. Essentially, you would make the image an imagemap, keep track of where the user clicked, zoom in on the area and send the new image. I can handle this part. Yet, performance might suck, here is why. Photo would have to fork to call Imagemagick to resizing, therefore the overhead for resizing will be high and performance will be slow. To speed this up, a python to Imagemagick native interface will be needed. There is an immature one in existance. I don't have, *or want*, the skills to complete this part of the task.
Why not offer support for severaly Imageprocessing packages where the user can chose from?
Photo is just a zope wrapper around PIL, ZPhotoAlbum is a easy-to-use interface for content managers. Supporting multiple packages would be like have multiple Photos, but the feature set would differ based on the image processing package. I guess this is a long way of saying, "I think this would be more a pain in the ass than it would be worth."
Okay, sounds reasonable :-)
- Conversion options would be very nice, for example Tiff->JPG or Gif Not everything is a "Photo" in the basic sense, maps or line art might look far better when presented as Gif.
Possible with Imagemagick, not so with PIL.
- Color Conversions would be important for me (and Zope in the prepress area) like CMYK -> RGB... This is very important when dealing with prepress (where many pictures for the web come from, still), but it is very complex, too. Conversion between the two models is done using transfer curves. There are standards for formats on it, but you would need a program able to work with them to obtain perfect results. If you do not take that into account or don't convert at all, the pictures would be very ugly!
Imagemagick might support this, PIL does not.
- Take Vector Formats into Account, convert EPS->JPEG or Gif. Or even better... use all available formats the solution permits!
Imagemagick handles this, more or less seamlessly, I believe.
Drew
So it seems like many reasons stand for ImageMagic!
Jochen
I think this is the way we will move.