X-Cart:Magnifier

Overview

What X-Magnifier does

X-Magnifier enhances delivery of image content in an X-Cart-based online store and provides enriched media experience to the store website visitors. Designed to facilitate presentation of high-resolution images on the Internet, X-Magnifier add-on module provides a Flash-based viewer that allows your store visitors to examine large images of your product items in detail and, possibly, even to save some time and traffic while doing so. Customers can freely zoom in and out on any area of an image, as well as drag the image around in the viewer work area to examine every detail of the item displayed. No image quality loss occurs during magnification, so your customers are provided the ultimate viewing experience at any magnification level.

X-Magnifier add-on module provides the following key features:

• Support for images of up to 2000 x 2000 px in size without image quality loss
• Smooth zooming and panning
• Unlimited number of zoomable images for any product in the store
• Skinnable image viewer, 2 skins included
• Resizable image viewer popup window
• Support for GIF, JPEG and PNG image formats
• Advanced tool for creating thumbnail icons
• Image repository located on the server file system
• Clear layout of all interface elements
• Ease of back-end administration

X-Magnifier add-on module is a valuable acquisition for any online store, but it is especially recommended for stores selling watches, jewelry items, home decorations, kitchen and tableware, cell phones and digital cameras, apparel and accessories, toys, antiques, artwork and various collectibles.

How X-Magnifier Works

X-Magnifier at a glance

The storefront part of the add-on provides an image viewer based on Macromedia Flash technology. The viewer allows website visitors to zoom and pan high-resolution images quickly and easily, regardless of connection speed. Images that can be displayed in the viewer are uploaded onto the server through X-Cart's administration back-end and are stored on the server file system in a multi-resolution tiled format which allows the user's browser to download only small amounts of data while an image is being panned within the viewer work area or zoomed to display an increasing level of detail.

Levels and tiles

The outstanding performance of X-Magnifier add-on module in displaying large high-resolution images even on a slow Internet connection is explained by the way these images are served to the user's web browser. Instead of providing to the browser an entire full-size large image, X-Magnifier gives the image away gradually in small portions.

After you upload an image into the store for the purpose of showcasing it in X-Magnifier viewer, this image is processed by the module in a certain way, which results in creation of levels and tiles for this image. Levels correspond to the magnification steps that the image will go through when being zoomed in the viewer. Tiles are small pieces of the image that will be loaded into the viewer at each magnification level.

The number of levels that is created for an image is defined dynamically and depends on the image size. The highest level corresponds to the largest scale at which a user will be able to view the image when zooming in.

The process of zooming and panning is as simple as switching between magnification levels and loading the necessary tiles. Whenever a user opts to change an image's zoom scale or to shift the image in the viewer work area, X-Magnifier calculates the magnification level at which the image needs to be displayed and allows the image viewer to load only those image tiles that represent portions of the image area selected by the user.

Flash technology ensures smooth transitions between the different magnification levels, so 'jumps' from one level to another are transparent to the user.

Each image tile loaded onto the user's computer is cached, so when the user chooses to return to an area of the image that he or she has already viewed, the tiles of that area do not have to be loaded from the server again, but are drawn from cache.

Due to that only a few tiles are loaded into the image viewer every time the user zooms or pans the image, load time and the amount of traffic consumed remain much smaller than they would be if the user's browser were loading entire large images.

Supported image formats and image size limitations

Source files for uploading into X-Magnifier can be in GIF, JPEG and PNG formats.

X-Magnifier does not have any limitations as to the file size of images that can be used. The file size of an image can be as large as you wish, as long as the server on which your store is running can handle it.

As to image dimensions, the maximum image size that X-Magnifier can handle without compression is 2000 by 2000 pixels. You can upload images of any size (which may be especially convenient when uploading pictures directly from your digital camera without resizing them in an external program), but all images larger than 4 megapixels will be automatically shrunk by the module to 2000 pixels along the maximum dimension.

Image repository

All the files produced by X-Magnifier as a result of processing an image that has been uploaded into the 'Images for X-Magnifier' section of your store are put into the directory '/xcart/images/Z/ProductID/ImageID', where '/xcart' is the directory of your X-Cart installation, 'ProductID' is a number representing the ProductID of the product for which the image was added and 'ImageID' is a number representing the ID of the image as assigned by X-Magnifier add-on module (For example, '/xcart/images/Z/63/1' would be a folder containing image files for the first zoomable image of a product whose ProductID is defined as 63).

Every '/xcart/images/Z/ProductID/ImageID' directory in your store will contain the following elements:

• a set of JPEG image files containing image tiles for different magnification levels (The filenames of such files are defined in the format n_x_y.jpg, where n stands for the level number, x and y - for the coordinates the tile is supposed to have in the layer matrix);
• level_0.jpg - an image file providing the smallest scale representation of the image that a user will be able to see in the viewer;
• thumbnail.jpg - an icon that will represent the image in the image nav bar of X-Magnifier image viewer if more than one zoomable images are added for the product;
• description.xml - an XML file describing the structure of levels of the image.

Warning: Please note that the contents of the directory /xcart/images/Z must not be tampered with. Removing or editing any files in this directory may corrupt your image data.

When moving your X-Cart-based store to a new location, be sure to move the directory '/xcart/images/Z/' with it retaining the directory structure.

Image format conversion issues

Note that any GIF and PNG images that you upload for use in X-Magnifier as zoomable images are automatically converted to JPEG. Please be aware that format conversion may have an undesirable effect on images that have transparent areas: as JPEG format does not support transparency, image areas that used to be transparent in GIF and PNG will no longer look transparent after the images are processed by X-Magnifier. In GIF files, transparent areas become black, while PNG transparency may turn into shades of gray.