Re: Panorama module for G3

On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 6:43 AM, Bharat Mediratta <[email protected]> wrote:
> Sorry to take so long to respond to this.  I've been busy travelling and
> getting beta 2 out the door.

It took three and a half years for me to respond... but I actually did
this, finally!

A bit of a long email follows; there's a question at the very end.

The last time I looked at the G3 code, I was a bit scared (which is
why I never even responded to your email, though looking back, it was
actually quite detailed and contained everything I needed to know.
Having spent a bit of time in the past few years working with an MVC
framework at work, I felt that my skills, which once upon a time were
basically only systems programming in C (and assembly) were ready for
this all this newfangled stuff. It turns out that G3 was quite
pleasant to develop for; definitely more so than G2 in terms of
simplicity, and light years ahead of the crud I usually hack out in
wordpress plugins.

A few notes, interspersed with your email (and mine, since I doubt
anyone's memory goes this far back)

>> In order to implement a panorama viewer in a similar fashion to that
>> of G2, I need to do two things. First, the full size image should be
>> rendered by a different wrapper (instead of img src, it's a parameter
>> passed to the flash viewer), and not shown via the lightbox effect.
>> Second, I need to store three pieces of information in the DB for each
>> picture (whether it's a panorama, and if so, the horizontal FOV and
>> the vertical FOV).
>
> Let's start with the second problem first.  To store extra data in the
> database, you'll need to create your own module.  Right now we don't
> have a way for you to hook into the existing "Edit Photo" dialog.  We
> will eventually, but for now you'll need to do the following:

By now, of course, there is; $form->edit_form etc. I used the
editcreation and editcaptured modules for a template.

[... snip ...]

> That will get you to the point where you have the data that you need.
> Now the next problem is, figuring out when you should display a panorama
> instead of a regular image.  There are two ways I can think of, offhand,
> to do that:
>
> 1) Write your own theme, then when it comes time to draw the image,
> check your database table to see if you have FOV entries and if you do,
> show the panorama version instead of the regular tag.
>
> 2) In your module's xxx_theme.php file, override photo_bottom() and if
> you detect FOV fields, use JS to rewrite the page to use your
> imageloader instead of the <img> tag.
>
> I'm thinking that approach #2 would work better here.

Right now, I added a models/MY_Item_Model.php, and hooked into
resize_img . I didn't want to create my own theme (I started doing
that, but I found the "mini mode" of greydragon to be much better for
my integration into my existing site style), but this seems to have
worked ok.

There's a forum topic at http://gallery.menalto.com/node/110643; the
code itself is at https://github.com/mikeage/panorama . Any feedback
would be greatly appreciated.

Two open issues:

1. the only bug I'm aware of is that I display the full size image,
which assumes the user (who thinks he's viewing a resized image) needs
permission to see the full image. I haven't yet added a check for what
happens when the user doesn't have full permissions.

2. From my experiments in G2, I saw that there's a maximum size that I
can display without running out of memory. In G2, I set multiple
resizes. I don't see a way to do that in G3; any suggestions for how I
can store 4 images: full size, normal resize, resize for the panorama
viewer (probably much bigger than the normal resize), and thumbnail?

Thanks in advance
-- Mike

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