Shozam Community

Riddle me this...

First, what is the maximum size (in pixels) for the "large" image in Shozam!?

Now, assuming I resize an image to fit within that "box", will Shozam! leave it alone and only render the small images?  Or does Shozam! look for other things like compression and color space?

The reason I ask is that I may want to apply sharpening or take other steps with the images in order to have a little more control.

(Or does one do that by making up something more specific for the "original"?) 

Larry 

I'm not really sure what all shozam does with an image. I know in step 5 under the image tab the compression settings do make a difference in quality. I have used 1024x768 for a maximum photo size and that seems to work alright in shozam. I use the gallery in an iframe sized a bit smaller than 1024x768. I presently resize my photos to 800x600 at a quality setting of 7 (70% of originals) and a resolution of 72x72dpi. These seem to work pretty good. In step 5 I set the quality at about 60 or 70 and the images seem to look pretty good in the slideshow and the large view. I don't use the option for original although I did at first and 1024x768 photos looked pretty good in the iframe.

Hope this was of some help. 

Larry, I don't have the specifications in front of me but I suggest a simple test. Create a gallery with two images, one very tall and one very wide. Looking at the images scaled/generated by Shozam, you will be able to identify how tall an image can be as well as how wide.

Now create an image which is EXACTLY at those dimensions and generate the gallery with that image using a very low and then a very high compression setting. Does it make a difference? I suspect it will and I can see your point that it may be better to not do anything. So if the program encounters an image that is EXACTLY of the target dimension, it will not do any processing at all on it...

HOWEVER, this will also mean that the image will not be watermarked. Also, the program does need to generate Large AND Medium images so even if you provide the image exactly as you want it for the Large setting, the program will have to do its automatic processing on the Medium image...

By the way, one way to tightly control images and circumvent any automatic processing done by Shozam is to:

• Make images unavailable at the ORIGINAL source location (from where they were added into Shozam)
• Alter the images in the gallery as you see fit

Basically, if the program does not find the original, it will not do any processing on the images it has previously generated in the gallery. The reason? Think of watermarking your images and then wanting to remove the watermark. Shozam will not be able to do this without access to the ORIGINALS.

This should give you some insight in how the program works. Am interested to know your feedback as to how it may best serve your purposes.