The Making of Pitstop Cafe Photo Wall using Deep Zoom
One of the most interesting features of Microsoft Silverlight technology is the Deep Zoom, originally codenamed Seadragon. What it does is that it break down an image into many small pieces of varying resolutions. When view from afar, a low resolution image can be used without the loss of details. As one zooms into an image, higher resolution of the image will be streamed in, providing higher detail. You can observe this feature in action when you use Google Earth.
Anyway Microsoft has a free tool known as the Deep Zoom Composer that allows one to easily create such images. Hence I decided to create a giant image of all the photos that I had taken at Pitstop Cafe for the past 3 years. The tools required are pretty easy to use. You can refer to this excellent guide on how about doing it. The tough part was actually organizing and managing over 6000 plus images. You can check out the photo wall for the end result.
However, there are some learning points that I like to share that will hopefully help to make your implementation even easier.
- Working with 6000 plus images can be slow when everything is in one folder. You might want to first plan on how you want to categorize the images and have them placed in different folders before commencing on the project.
- I had problem importing and working with an image that is at 200 MB size. I ended up splitting it into 4 images of 50 MB and it work fine. So if you encounter similar problem, you might like to try to use AndreaMosaic software to split up the image first and stitch back again using the Deep Zoom Composer.
- When you are removing an imported image from your Deep Zoom project, apart from deleting it in the project workspace, you will also need to manually delete the copy of the image file from your project folders. Otherwise you might encounter problems with importing an image in the future that has the same name.
- Microsoft Silverlight Streaming site is the best site to host. It is free and it gives you a 10 GB hosting space! One problem I faced during the deployment stage is that the upload feature does not have a progress indicator and you are left wondering if the upload is actually taking place successfully. I tried to upload a 500 MB file and leave my machine running for a few hours. At the end of it, I got an error message but surprisingly the whole file did went through. Hence when you see an error page after uploading for a period of time, check on your application status on the administration panel first before repeating the upload process.
In conclusion, it is easy to get started on doing your own Deep Zoom project. The tools really simplified alot of the steps involved. For those who are more technically inclined, you can also easily export and modify your Deep Zoom project using Visual Studio or Expression.
Useful links:
Hope this is useful. Do check out the photo wall and give me your comments.
