Saturday, June 14, 2008

Understanding Deep Zoom - Part 2

My previous post gave a more abstract view of what Deep Zoom Technology is all about. What is the back-end process? The main executable file is Mermaid.exe which allows one to import images, compose and export a Composition or a Collection. 

deepzoomcomposer 

Now what is a Composition and a Collection? In case of a Composite, Deep Zoom Composer considers the entire art board as a single image irrespective of number of images that are placed and irrespective of their position. This single image is split into tiles until the smallest tile is of size 4kb. This enables a more optimised design. However, access to a single image is absent. Well, this was the case with the first version of Deep Zoom Composer. The next update allowed creation of a Collection. This allowed creation of an image tree for each image instead of flattening the entire composition into a single image. One can now control each image individually. The only possible drawback here would be the time consumption involved in case there are a number of images.

The below image shows that Deep Zoom Composer can export both a collection and a composition based on choice.

dz23

As you can see from above, the updated version also provides code for arranging images in a Grid. You can see this if you choose "Import Images and Silverlight Project".

No comments: