Our listing went live today, so here's a link to the page with the cool zoomable images: http://www.solanadelmar.com/page.cfm?page=forsale
Some people were asking about the underlying technologies, and I posted a few details on another post. Here's what I've learned. There is push-button capability (more or less) built into Photoshop versions CS3 and CS4 (File/Export/Zoomify). I'm not sure of exactly what parameters enable the function (8 bit mode?), but if you have a .JPG in the editing window, it is enabled. You export the file and it will create a directory of tiles and a sample page and put a default viewer. You just copy those files to your web server and you have a zoomable image; it's as easy as that.
I wanted to customize the viewer so I went to zoomify and purchased the customizable files; consequently, the viewer that you are using to see those photos is my customized version. Creating a customized viewer is not difficult if you have a programming background or at least an HTML background. If you have neither, then it may be more intense that you bargained for and you might stick with the off-the-shelf viewer.
There are other tools available if you don't have photoshop or don't want to use the zoomify function. Some mapping professors/students have created an image tile cutter for tiling maps, but it can also be used to tile .JPG photos. Link: http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/software/googlemapimagecutter.asp This tool cuts up the photos and allows you to use the Google map interface as the browsing interface. Pro: No Zoomify flash widget. Con: You have to learn about custom google maps, and each view will be counted against your google map count for the month. I started using this tool, but I had some problems when tiling really large images. It took me some time to get the google interface exactly the way that I wanted, but, in the end, I decided not to use the map interface for photo browsing. If you don't have a web design/programming background, then I would not recommend going this route.
If you want to show off your beautiful images, THIS IS IT! BUT BE FOREWARNED - While this is REALLY cool stuff, you do need web server space to store the files and so you need to know how to upload files to a web server, and, as indicated, creating customized stuff requires some work.
John Hokkanen, Broker, www.SurfTheTurf.com
PS: One other item. Someone asked how I created that really high-res image of the living room. Here is what I did. I took the photo of the room with a 17mm lens. Since my camera shoots full sensor (no multiplication factor), it's a nice, wide shot. The shot was lined up so that the window was dead center in the view finder. Then, being extremely light-handed and carefult not to move the camera or tripod in any way, I replaced the 17mm lens with my 100mm lens and shot the window. (NOTE: Before I had taken the image with the 17mm lens, I had set up the camera using the 100mm lens.) Then, in photoshop, I resized the room photo so that I could then drop in the window photo. When tiling the large image, the software resizes it, which means that the photo is very sharp, and the center of the picture is equally sharp at the highest zoom level.
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