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One of our favorite new tools is a Flash image "zoomer" called Zoomify. They offer several products, including plug-ins for Photoshop and full Flash-movie access. Their Free Zoomifyer EZ is the one we will talk about.

The Issue: You want to be able to show great detail for your products.
The Problem: The only way to do that online is to make the images REALLY big, since screens have very low resolution (72/96dpi vs 300dpi+ for print).
The Solution: Use a Flash-based player to create a smoothly scrolling, image zooming widget.

There are two parts to integrating Zoomify. Once you download it, you will need to open it up and install the image maker on your computer. You need to upload to your website, via FTP, a small Flash movie. You will be referring to this file whenever you are calling in the zoomed image.

In a nutshell, what Zoomify does is scale and slice your high res image into a bunch of smaller images. You do this by dragging and dropping a high-res image onto the Zoomifyer EZ icon on your desktop, or you can open and select a bunch of files and then go do something else for a few minutes, depending on how high-res your images are and how many you have.

If you have a PHP (or other dynamically-driven) template-based website, you can easily integrate Zoomify into your layout. There are a few parameters you would set as defaults in your URL to control the look and feel. 

For a client of ours, Final Cut (http://www.finalcut.com), an engraver of fine crystal, we created several hundred Zoomify images. Integrating the Zoomified images into their Miva Merchant-based website was the easy part. Processing the images took some time. Uploading them all took a very long time. They started out with images roughly 2MB each. This translated into nearly 1GB of images. So, make sure you have the room already allocated both on your PC and your web hosting account before you start. If you run out of room, you will end up with corrupted, empty files, even though the names are all there.

For it's overall simplicty, Zoomifyer EZ is a great tool. For free, it's a fantastic tool. Get your site zooming today!

Sites Mentioned in this article:
http://www.zoomify.com
http://www.finalcut.com

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