Shozam Community

Hi, I am working with the trial - advanced version. In the past, for web - computer viewing, I typically resize my photos (after editing) to 600x800 and sharpen. It is not clear to me if this is a waste of time when using Shozam. In my test gallery, the images that I had resized certainly processed faster than those that were still full sized, but I am concerned about the algorithyms Shozam uses to shrink and if sharpening is reapplied, etc.. I don't want o add un necessary effort to my work flow, but the quality of the image is important. ( I do not like to see compression artifacts.) Is there a consensus on this? In the trial I found that the slideshow feature did not work. Is this normal for the trial? I read in other threads that having a dedicated homepage built in another software package is the recommended practise with linking to the gallery(s), but am I correct that one could simply upload a gallery to ones web site server if one chose to? I would like to get some images up quickly, then develop the site as time permits to reflect more site sophistication. With the banner and a "contact me" the essentials would be there. Any comments greatly appreciated. PS... I have been looking at quite a few different photo gallery software packages and Shozam produces the most elegant results while retaining ease of use. It costs a bit more but as always you get what you pay for.

 Welcome to Shozam.

I'll try to answer as best I can.

1. Waste of time resizing.  I tried that and if you work with a lot of images, you will be cutting into whatever recreation time you have.

2. Step 5 - Image Tab - Sets your compression.  Higher number, better quality, more server space eaten up, slower generation.  Fact of life with images.  Resizing any image also lessens quality from the original.

3.  Have no idea why Slideshow does not work.  Contact support.

4. You can upload just a gallery if you want and use that as your web site temporarily.  Build your expanded site at your pace.

5. I was brief.  Others will most likely visit also.

Off to my recreation time.

Cowboy

 You might want to look at my gallery. I use a program called Thumbsplus (have been using it for years) to do a batch resize (reduce to 1024x768 at 100% and 1200x1200 DPI). I then let Shozam compress them on gallery creation to 80%. My total gallery size is about 125 megs at this point but includes audio files. The quality on most photos is excellent for online viewing although 1200x1200 DPI is NOT necessary online. 72x72 or a little higher would actually suffice. I have created a few galleries at 70% compression and they viewed just fine at that setting. I tried 60% compression and they started to lose quality (dark skies became a bit grainy). Hope this helps. Build a small gallery of photos and try different settings to see which gives you the quality you need.

I also looked at many photo gallery programs before deciding on Shozam. I personally think it far surpasses the other programs for what I was wanting to do with my photos.
 

Cowboy & Tom... Thanks. First, I aologize for tha apparent lack of carrige returns for paragraphs in my first post. I didn't type it in the way it appeared(?!). We will see how this reply posts. Cowboy... your 'brevity' was perfect... no apologies necessary. Tom, I checked out your site the other day from another thread. Very nice and the photo quality is good. I am confused about your batch resizing process. I follow that you are reducing the full sizes to 1024x768 but the DPI value is not particularly relevant in this context as that only relates to printing and by extension print size. As far as Shozam is concerned 1024x 768 is all it cares about, I think, as it is going to resize to its own internal requiements for thumbs, quick view, and large, but since 1024 is closer to its needs, presumably it will do lessresizing and less potential damage. I suspect 800x600 is even closer, requiring even less reduction. When you mention 100% I assume that means letting Thumbsplus use the highest quality, minimum compression? As virtually all my images start as RAW files, I have to add sharpening to the final edit. I get the best results on resized images when I apply sharpening AFTER the resize. I just checked the batching capabilities of ACDsee Pro2 and I am very pleased to find that it can do virtually anything to a batch with full control of every edit operation. Very cool. I am a VERY big fan of ACDsee (Pro) BTW for DAM and fast uncomplicated edits. The Pro2 version is a free and very stable beta for anyone curious to take a look at it. I will try a test gallery using ACDsee to 'preprocess' as it is painless time wise and will speed the Shozam processing. BTW, Tom.... what program do you use for web page(s) creation? Thanks again to both of you. Paul Y.

I am quite peprlexed as to why my posts do not include carriage returns... makes things hard to read. I have never observed this behavior before on any other forum. I am an Opera user... maybe that is it. I will try Firefox later and see if that helps..... sorry for the hard to read posts.

 My photos start as RAW and then using the camera software I extract to jpg (which end up about 4-6 megs). Yes I use Thumbsplus at 100% during the batch resizing which actually increases the the number of megs per file (yes no compression). Using my settings in Shozam I mentioned before, the files are compressed quite a bit actually from what I see in the folders it creates. Sizes are roughly as follows: small image - 6k, med image - 90 to 150k, large - 250k.

Thanks for the info about ACDsee, I have downloaded the beta and will take a close look at it. I generally don't do any editing to any of my photos other than cropping.

I mostly use Thumbsplus for batch processing: resizing, rotating or cropping. It mostly is a catalogging program for images and that's mainly what I use it for.

Since my site and gallery are hosted at Yahoo I use their sitebuilder program to create my website just for ease of use, but I will be moving my gallery to another server soon just because of space and data transfer. Yahoo is fairly expensive to add additonal space and data transfer.  It's merely an edited template I found which I liked. I am familiar with a few other programs such as frontpage but found sitebuilder to  be very simple to use and causes no problems with my gallery, unlike some of the issues with frontpage extensions. I use a simple flash builder for the animations. 

I hope my info is of some help to you and not just a bunch of using "dribble". I've been quite happy with Shozam since early beta. My biggest complaint so far is that during the creation of my gallery it's a bit slow. I'm going to try your suggestion of doing all my processing (compression) before putting photos in the albums and see if it's not faster.

Looking forward to seeing your gallery 

 

 Tom...  all dialog produces useful info... it's not 'dribble' to me.

 In poking around the blogs on this site I found a short but useful article regarding file compression and related Shozam settings....

"Bypass Shozam Image Processing / Setting Image File Compression to 100", you might find this of interest.

The 'site builder' you are referring to is probably the one built in to the Yahoo site.  A lot of ISPs have some variation of this but mine is not much 'fun' to use.   I am almost afraid to admit to it as "real" web designers probably scoff at it, but I just redid a simple site for my business using Visual Site Designer by CoffeeCup and it is really  easy to use and quite inexpensive.  A few minor quirks but  otherwise super simple WYSIWYG.  The big names in web design have too steep a learning curve....  I am not looking for a new hobby, just want to get a respectable site up.   Spend way to many hours in front of  the computer as it is and not enough time taking photos.

 

I will let you know when my gallery is up.  Thanks for your comments.

 

P. 

The link somehow did not come through in the post above. Here it is:
Bypass Shozam Image Processing / Setting Image File Compression to 100

For best workflow, in terms of speed an quality, that includes pre-processing outside of Shozam, I would batch process images (you can use ACDSee, ThumbsPlus, or any other image processor):

• Check images are in sRGB color space (convert from Adobe RGB if need be)
• Resize to w=753px x h=565px (this is the largest image size used in standard layouts for Large Pages) unless you want to use the "Source image" option on the Other tab in Step 2 (in which case you would resize them to whatever dimension you want to use for the Source image.
• Sharpen images
• Save with a very high quality JPG setting (low compression)
• Import images in Shozam
• Set image quality in Shozam at 70 or 80

This workflow offers the following advantages:

• Ensures your images show more consistently with the correct coloration on various montitors/browsers (ensured by sRGB)
• Faster Shozam processing since input files are smaller and large images do not have to be resized at all
• Better quality images since the large images will retain your custom sharpening (since they do not get resized)

Currently, the Large images are still going through the JPG codec and saved at the quality settings specified in Shozam even if the image does not need to be scaled down. At a later date we may add an option in Shozam so the program does not touch the image if it does not need to be scaled (it would just place a copy of the original in the Large images folder of the gallery). This will allow the image to retain size, sharpening AND jpg compression settings of the original.

FYI, since "best practices" are of general interest, we have posted this information also in the FAQs that are part of the online help:
http://www.helpconsole.com/Shozam/default.aspx?page=FAQs2.aspx