What Would you Like to See in Future Releases of Deep Zoom Composer?

Hi everyone,
After a bit of a break, we are currently getting the next preview of Deep Zoom Composer ready. While that is going through the final leg of the release process, I was wondering what you would like to see in future releases of Deep Zoom Composer?

Based on the great feedback many of you have provided on my earlier question of a similar sort, I have no doubt that you all will be forthcoming with your opinions on what works, what doesn’t, and what you like to see in future releases.

Thanks,
Kirupa :)

Comments

• Anonymous
  February 13, 2009
  Ok, to break the ice, I will go first:

1. Improved Memory Management. Deep Zoom Composer takes up a lot of memory, and it takes up a lot of memory during the import process and not during the compose step. This is a major hindrance for dealing with large quantities of images.
2. Better Collection Story. Due to the nature of collections, they don't need to be manually arranged. DZC should allow for one to import large quantities of images, pick from pre-defined templates, and then export. The chosen template will take care of arranging the images on the fly in Silverlight.
3. Make PhotoZoom more reliable. I had to throw this one in there. Don't worry. We are working on improving this right now actually. Cheers! Kirupa :)

• Anonymous
  February 13, 2009
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  February 13, 2009
  Kirupa, your suggestions are spot-on.  Since I'm using Deepzoomtools.dll, I want to see all improvements available programmatically, including the templates.  I know the lower-level things are automatic, since Composer uses the DLL, but it'd be great if you can make some of the higher-level features available as well. Thanks, John

• Anonymous
  February 13, 2009
  I second Kirupa about the large image collections. Please make it easier to use DZC to compose extremely large quantities (i.e. 1mil) of images.

• Anonymous
  February 13, 2009
  I want the SDK for create Deep Zoom Effect programmatically

• Anonymous
  February 13, 2009
  Hi Sergey, Could you please clarify what you mean by SDK? You currently have the ability to use DeepZoomTools.dll to create your own deep zoom tiles automatically without having to fiddle with DZC. Time permitting, I will try to post a sample online describing some of the basics of how DeepZoomTools.dll works :) Cheers! Kirupa

• Anonymous
  February 14, 2009
  a container format (something like smooth streaming) that warp everything in one big files and some sort of manifest file instead of thousands of small jpegs.  Any practical photo sharing site would require this.

• Anonymous
  February 14, 2009
  Integrate ability to do the metadata thing that http://www.memorabilia.hardrock.com has done. What I mean is when you zoom into a particual part you can pass some data about what the user is looking at. the idea with templates is great (thanks kirupa). keep up the good work!

• Anonymous
  February 14, 2009
  I liked your powerlaw zoom applications. Do you think you could wrap that into DZC. So that we have both a MSI and one(or more) overlay layers where we can put icons, markup, etc?

• Anonymous
  February 15, 2009
  I'd like to see some more information on layouts for those of us using the API. It would be really nice to see the API aimed a people who want to create deep zoom albums online. The composer is nice, but I really want to be able to have my collections created/edited using programming. Thanks!

• Anonymous
  February 15, 2009
  I'd like to see some more information on layouts for those of us using the API. It would be really nice to see the API aimed at people who want to create deep zoom albums online. The composer is nice, but I really want to be able to have my collections created/edited using programming. Thanks!

• Anonymous
  February 15, 2009
  In this issue: Yasser Makram, Mark Monster, Jesse Liberty, Peter McGrattan, Nigel Sampson, and Radenko

• Anonymous
  February 18, 2009
  Hi, I would like to see a optional setting to define the size of the output silverlight-video. Sometimes I want to have a particular size and not the standard-format the DZC is now using and there is a lot of manual work you have to do in this case right now. btw: great work so far! :) Greets from germany, Gordon

• Anonymous
  February 18, 2009
  A simple way to import a power point slide deck would be nice. I'm guessing this wouldbe two hard between the dll and programming Office but I han;t got around to it. Basically each slide would be a "photo" in deep zoom composer i coudl arrange them as I want on giant canvas. It can make for a very nice interactive story board  style presentation

• Anonymous
  February 19, 2009
  Today (as announced by Tim Sneath ) the Silverlight team released an update for the plug in which is

• Anonymous
  February 19, 2009
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  February 19, 2009
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  February 19, 2009
  Jachri - feel free to let us know what about DZC is daunting. Our goal is to make the actual application itself as easy to use as possible. The DLL is a different story. It is something that we are targeting primarily for developers who enjoy working with code. Thanks, Kirupa

• Anonymous
  February 22, 2009
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  February 22, 2009
  Adding to your own suggestions,

1. Specify image Tag in DeepZoomTools.dll.
2. DeepZoomTools.dll documentation would be nice.

• Anonymous
  February 26, 2009
  Hi, I would love to be able to rotate pictures on the "Compose" step!

• Anonymous
  March 08, 2009

• change background color, is it yet possible? I can only change it partly in the StyleSheet
• add text
• place links, yes, having the possibility to link the images would make this really take off
• possibility to add a fixed element, for example a title (like the buttons are fixed)

• Anonymous
  March 11, 2009
  I would like to specify a starting zoom level.  The first 5-7 zoom levels create very small images.  Silverlight doesn't even let me zoom out far enough to see them.  It would be nice to say my smallest zoom should create a image at least 200px width/height.  For example, a possible image I'm breaking up is 11922x8872.  The 0 folder contains a 1x1 pixel image... That is not useful at all.  The 7 folder contains a 94x70 pixel image... still too small to make anything out.

• Anonymous
  March 11, 2009
  I wonder if it'd be possible to make DZC more stable.  I'm one of the early users, i built mt first projects Aug 2008.  The tool is great, but here are the issues that i noticed with the latest release:

1.  No backward compatibility (that's OK, the product is not release yet, I understand, sigh...)
2. I can't add new albums to my page at PhotoZoom anymore.   2.1. I login to PhotoZoom (by the way, it forces me to re-login every time I open a new project), enter all the required information for a New Album, but the "Publish" button stays greyed out. 2.2. OK, i found my way around this bug (click on the "Existing albums" tab, click on any project, watch the "Publish" button enabling, go back to "New albums" tab, it stays enabled).  Now I can publish!  But no, although the project does get created in PhotoZoom during export, the export process is never successful, giving me either “…Please remove some images from your composition…” (even for the album of 1 image!) or "The remote server returned an error: (400) Bad Request", or something else.  It looks like the error messages are randomly selected. :)
3.  If I go to the “Custom” tab and create a project locally, I can see it right away in the browser, but I can’t call it back after I closed it.  In the previous version I had .html file with my collection that I could open with IE.  It’s not created anymore with this version.   So, in fact, currently, what I can do is create an album and watch it right away.  I can’t post it on the net, and even if I want to show it to anyone I need to open DZC, open my project and re-export it locally.  This is not very useful at the moment… Again, I love the tool and would like to use it.  If I can. PS. (I run Vista)

• Anonymous
  March 25, 2009
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  April 08, 2009
  Hi! At thirst I want to thank you for your great work. What I would like to see in further versions is the ability to add a tag cloud to the composion, like the Tag Updater does - but in a easier way... It would also be great when you could add a function that allows the user to set a link to a html page on each photo. Some style things like automatically adding frames on photos, image-rotating, choosing the canvas size and colour directly in dzc would also be great.

• Anonymous
  April 08, 2009
  Hi maxico86, Glad you like DZC :) I've added your suggestions to our backlog, and hopefully a future release of DZC will have some of them implemented. Cheers! Kirupa

• Anonymous
  April 09, 2009
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  April 09, 2009
  BTW ... if I set the size to something other than 800x600 in the object tag can it be smart enough to reset the zoom level to default to filling the space (or give me an option to set a default zoom level via parameters) and also intelligently move the controls - I changed it to 400x288 to fit a space I had and... all the controls disappeared (I guess I need to edit xaml and recompile?)

• Anonymous
  April 20, 2009
  I would like to give a scale to my large pictures (town-planning-documents) while or before uploading. And I would like to choose a certain scale to view the plan on the screen and also to print an excerpt in a certain scale , for instance 1:1000, 1:500, or 1:100. This would bring more comfort than zooming a large document with acrobat reader or similar viewers.

• Anonymous
  April 21, 2009
  The 2 biggies which get my vote are (PS why don't you use a voting approach to allow ranking of suggestions):

1.  Better Collection Story as you have suggested.  It takes an age to do the layout manually.  Ideal here would be the ability to define your own templates - not just pre-defined stock templates.  Including ability to define picture frames and rotation would also be nice.
2.  Image tagging/metadata as suggested by Adam Thalhammer above.

• Anonymous
  June 20, 2009
  As always, please uninstall all existing versions of Deep Zoom Composer before installing the new version

• Anonymous
  June 16, 2010
  ohhhhhhhhhhhhh nice im so happy 2 have a freind her,,,,,,,,,,,,,