So I have a programming project that I have to do for my school. What I have to do is setup a 2 player dice game. I could have gone the easy way and just display the number of the 2 die, but I was thinking of using images that I made in photoshop instead. However, the problem is that I do not know how to change images in an efficient way.
My first option is using the visibility tag on several images laid on top of eachother and change it accordingly as such
image1.visible = false
image2.visible = true
However, I do not think that is very efficient. Images also do not support changing the image with code from my research.
Secondly, I could use a PictureBox instead, which do support changing the image as the program is running. However, it does not support transparency, and the die images are transparent. Plus it gives me the invalid image file error, I guess due to the transparency in the gif files.
There is also the cheap workaround of me making the background of the images the same as the form background.
So is there a more efficient way I am missing out? I know that the cheap workaround would be the best option for this case, but I would like to have this knowledge for future use like semi-transparent pixels that blend in and such.
And before you ask, no, I cannot use another programming language as visual basic 6 is what my school teaches. Thankfully they are changing it soon, but I am stuck with this for now.
Turns out you CAN change the pictures of Images, while keeping transparency and stretch. I am going to properly show it:
Image1.Picture = LoadPicture("YOURPATHHERE.gif")
This is what I get for believing what I've seen on some forum.
Also, the error of invalid image file was due to the images being corrupted for some reason.
We are using a png/8 sprite on a client's website. He is reporting the image is appearing distorted for him and on other computers on the company.
Here's how it should look:
http://i.imgur.com/wfV7ReR.jpg
And here is the print screen the client sent us:
http://i.imgur.com/sWKDYKU.jpg
I have tried donloading and exporting it again, uploading again. The problem is: On our computers it looks fine, so it's hard to test it. Our client is viewing it in IE: 11 and Google chrome: 41.0.272.118.
Has anyone seen this type of error before?
It may be the device-pixel-ratio is better than 160dpi; that'd throw off some CSS used for spriting.
If this shows "1" for you and a different value for them, I'd dig farther on that one. You could probably test this by hitting the site with an iPhone or newer Android device; they have >1.0 pixel ratios.
http://www.devicepixelratio.com/
Edit: this would also show up across-browsers on their end, as it's tied to the hardware, and not IE11.
My bet in that case is the PNG is somehow broken.
graphicdesign.stackexchange.com might be more useful; I don't know if this is fixable in CSS. (Might be; look for hacks around image backgrounds as well.)
Looking around, if you have Photoshop, you might try saving the original image, then creating a copy and changing this setting:
Image -> Mode -> Check "RGB Color"
Alternatively, try opening the image in pixlr.com, change anything however slightly, then save and use that one.
My strong suspicion is something in the way the PNG/8 is saved (maybe the alpha channel) is the issue, not any CSS you've written. Good luck!
I have spent a lot of time on my product images, adjusting them to perfectly match the actual product's color.. white balance, tint, contrast, hue.. But now when I look at them in Magento, they have been butchered beyond belief. For my products, it is mandatory that the images appear precisely as do the products. I have plenty of bandwidth and am not concerned with minimizing file size. I also do not mind if I have to manually resize and upload the same image two or three times if I can somehow bypass the processing that is happening altogether.
Magento is great! But this is a showstopper. I cannot launch the website if the images do not look right. If I can't do this, I'm actually going to have to ditch this cart which I've spent months learning, or spend a lot of time coming up with my own solution even though I have no low-level mysql experience. Either way, delaying launch would really hurt financially.
I have attempted to insert ->setQuality(99), after the call to init() and before the call to resize(), in \catalog\product\view\media.phtml, and also after the call to init() in \catalog\product\gallery.phtml.
in both cases I have also used setQuality(10) to ensure that I have done it properly, and strangely it works in gallery.phtml but not in media.phtml. It doesn't matter though, because even though the 100 value in gallery.phtml is not too bad in terms of detail, unfortunately contrast/color/exposure is different. It looks washed out and desaturated. It makes the product look unappealing.
In a thread at magentocommerce.com, someone suggested that it is the resize() function that is causing the problem, but that can't be true because resize() is not called within gallery.phtml. In general people have pointed to GD2.php as the culprit, but I haven't found any solutions that get around it completely.
If I were to upload a 265 px width image for the media.phtml view, and a separate one of the same photo using whatever resolution I desire for the blown-up gallery.phtml view, how would I tag those in the backend (base or small? or will I need more tags?) and then how would I access the proper image from the phtml files? This is a bit over my head. I think I can figure it out but not without spending a lot of time, which I do not have. Is there an extension that exists that already has tackled this problem? I notice that some of the "lightbox" extensions are popular, but none of their descriptions mention anything about overcoming the horrendous image quality spit out by gd2, which makes me doubt that they do.
Can someone please offer some advice? If there is already an extension, I would be so pleased. Thank you.
It seems the best solution is to switch from Magento's default Gd2 library to ImageMagick for more control and better resolution. The Magento forums have a post with the details here. You need to make sure that your edits are performed in an upgrade-safe manner.
I have a set of really big images out of which I need to crop little snippets. These snippets are all exactly the same size but don't follow a strict pattern so I can't do this programatically.
Ideally I would like to open up one of the big files and be able to point and click on say, the top left corner of a snippet and have that automatically be saved to disk without even having to enter a file name, and then continue on with the rest. (Of course this would be the ideal way which I know is probably way off the real possible way!).
I started doing this in Photoshop CS4 but cropping a snippet, saving, undoing (to get to the full image), and starting over again takes way too long.
Maybe someone has a better way to do this in photoshop or in some other software.
Thanks for reading!
Instead of cropping and undoing, you could:
make (or resize) a selection
copy the selection to a new image
save the image
close the image
You might need to split it into two actions, I don't know enough about programming Photoshop.
Thank you everyone for your input.
I ended up doing this with a suggestion a colleague of mine came up with. It consisted of creating a Photoshop "slice" over the first region I wanted to crop and then cloning that region over the rest of the other sections. After that, using Save For Web (and ofter hitting Continue when PS complained about how that image was way beyond Save For Web's capabilities) I could save all images at once.
This was the fastest and easiest method I could find. Until then I was going with Mark Ransom's method.
What are some effective strategies for preventing the use of my proprietary images?
I'm talking about saving them, direct linking to them etc...
Presently I have a watermark on the image, but I'd rather not.
.NET platform preferred, but if there's a strategy that's on another platform that integrates with my existing application that'd be a bonus.
It's not possible to make it "impossible" to download. When a user visits your site you're sending them the pictures. The user will have a copy of that image in the browsers cache and he'd be able to access it even after he leaves the site ( depending on the browser, of course ). Your only real option is to watermark them :O
You could embed each image inside of a flash application, then the browser wouldn't know how to 'save' the image and wouldn't store the raw jpg in the cache folder either. They could still just press the print screen key to get a copy of the image, but it would probably be enough to stop most visitors.
Response.WriteBinary(), embedded flash, JavaScript hacks, hidden divs.
Over the years I have seen and tried every possible way to secure an image and I have come to one conclusion: If it can be seen online; it can be taken, my friend.
So, what you really should consider what the final goal of this action would really be. Prevent piracy? If a gross and oversized watermark is not your style, you can always embed hidden data (Apress had an article that looked promising on digital steganography) in images to identify them as your own later. You might only offer reduced or lower quality images.
Flickr takes the approach of placing a transparent gif layer on top of the image so if you are not logged in and right click you get their ever awesome spaceball.gif. But nothing can prevent a screenshot other than, well, just not offering the picture.
If the music industry could get you to listen to all of your music without copying or owning files they would. If television could broadcast and be certain nobody could store a copy of the cast, they probably would as well. It's the unfortunate part of sharing media with the public. The really good question here is how you can protect your material WITHOUT getting in the way of respectable users from consuming your images. Put on too much protection and nobody will go to your site/use your software (Personally if you try to disable my mouse I'll go from good user to bad nearly instantly).
using JavaScript to override the click event is the most common I have seen...
see: http://pubs.logicalexpressions.com/pub0009/LPMArticle.asp?ID=41
I figure I might as well put in my two cents.
None of the above methods will work with perhaps the exception of a watermark.
Wherever I go, I can hit print screen on my computer and paste into a graphics editor, and with a little cropping, I have your image.
The only way to overcome the watermark issue would be to use photoshop tools to remove the watermark. At this point, i think most people would just give up and pay you for your content or at a minimum go rip off somebody else.
Short answer: you can't. Whatever you display to a user is going to be available to them. You can watermark it, blur it, or offer a low-res version of it, but the bottom line is that whatever images are displayed in the user's browser are going to be available to them in some way.
It's just not possible. There is always the PrintScreen button.
Whatever is displayed, can be captured.
I would watermark them, and reduce the resolution, of the actual files, instead of doing it through an application on the user's end.
unfortunately you can always screen grab the browser and crop the image out, not perfect but it circumvents almost every solution posted here :(
Another approach I've seen that's still entirely vulnerable to screen grabs but does make right-click and cache searching sufficiently annoying is to break the image up into many little images and display them on your page tiled together to appear as though they were a single image. But as everyone has said, if they can see it, they can grab it.
Realistically you can't, unless you don't want them to see it in the first place. You could use some javascript to catch the right mouse button click, but that's really about it.
Another thought, you could possibly embed it in flash, but again, they could just take a screenshot.
Sorry. That's impossible. All you can do is make it inconvenient a la flickr.
It's just not possible. There is always the PrintScreen button.
I remember testing ImageFreeze years ago. It used a Java applet to fetch and display images. The image data and connection was encrypted and the unencrypted image wasn't stored in a temp folder or even in Java's cache.
Also, the applet constantly cleared the windows clipbrd so Print Screen didn't work.
It worked pretty good, but it had some faults.
Besides requiring Java, the JS that embedded the applet (and maybe the applet itself) was setup to not load properly in any browser that didn't give access to the windows clipbrd. This meant that it only worked in IE and only on windows.
Also, the interval the applet used to clear the clipbrd could be beaten with a really fast Print Screen and ctrl+v into Gimp. Printing the screen in other ways would work too.
Finally, Jad could decompile the applet and all/most of its files. So, if you really wanted the pics, you could poke around in the source to figure out how they did it.
In short, you can go out of your way to stop a lot of people, but usability goes down the drain and there will always be a way to get the image if the visitor can see it.
Anything you send to the client is, like, on the client. Not much you can do about it besides making somewhere between "sorta hard" and "quite hard" to save the image.
I must say in the begining that it is almost impossible to stop the
images or text being copied, but making it difficult will prevent most
of the users to steal content.. In this article I will give a easier
but effective way of protecting images with html/css. We will take a
very simple way for this… Firstly in a div we will place the image
with a given height and width. (Say 200 X 200)
Now we can place another transparent image with same height and
width and give it a margine of -200. So that it will overlap the
actual image. And when the user will try to copy this, they will end
up with the transparent gif only…
<div style=”float: left;”>
<img src=”your-image.jpg” style=”width: 200px;height: 200px;”/>
<img src=”the-dummy-image.png” style=”border: 0px solid #000; width: 200px; height: 250px; margin-left: -200px; ” />
</div>