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Image Uploader Use Cases

Why Image Uploader

Image Uploader delivers substantial value to all stake holders involved both in the project development flow and in the production and profit making.

Solution Owners

Image Uploader is a powerful upload component designed for Web 2.0 projects, photo print services, image galleries, e-commerce and any other image-centered and/or upload-enabled solutions.

Solution Developers

For the developer, Image Uploader is more than just a control and an applet. It is an SDK that ships with detailed documentation (covering both the API and the features) and real-life samples for the most widely used server platforms.

Moreover, free Image Uploader ASP.NET control and Image Uploader PHP library are included. The ASP.NET control makes it possible to deploy and configure the uploader in Visual Studio via design mode. The PHP library implements almost the same functionality in PHP language.

End Users

From the point of view of the end user, Image Uploader has an attractive appearance and intuitive user interface.

Image Uploader features several layouts, so you can choose the one that is the most appropriate for the solution. Moreover, you can choose to show the progress bar and remaining upload time estimation. End users can abort and resume uploads, use drag-n-drop and upload entire folders, too.

To start uploading, a user only needs to have Java Runtime Environment installed (that is, for the Java part to run; the ActiveX control users do not need Java) and Image Uploader downloaded and enabled.

Objectives Solved

Making mass file uploads easy - that is what Image Uploader is all about. It also enables the uploads of entire folders, ZIP compression, user quota and basic image processing functionality. The imaging capabilities of Image Uploader cover the needs of a variety of photo-centered solutions, including photo print services, Web 2.0, picture galleries, stock photo auctions, etc.

The uploader does all imaging client-side, which spares the server a great deal of load. The imaging-related operations include resize and rotation, watermarking, EXIF and IPTC metadata extraction and JPEG compression. This way, you only need to get enough bandwidth to receive the photos ready for printing or public display.

Image Uploader provides a wide range of supervisory functions (i.e. user quota). These include specifying the maximum and minimum permissible size of the uploaded files (both in pixels and megabytes), restricting allowed file extensions, disallowing the uploads of CMYK files, etc.

Moreover, the uploader allows getting and posting supplementary data from the client. To that end, Image Uploader enables the end user to enter descriptions for images. Besides, the fields of the POST requests sent by Image Uploader can be customized to send arbitrary data to the server.

Image Uploader works with any server part that is able to receive POST requests via HTTP. To illustrate this, we have included several samples for the most popular server platforms.

Integratability and Compatibility

Image Uploader easily integrates with your existing solutions. Here, the ASP.NET control and PHP library can be of much help to the ASP.NET and PHP developers. The customizability of the POST requests allows seamless data exchange between the uploader and in-house and third-party applications and APIs.

Image Uploader supports the majority of modern browsers, including Firefox, Safari (for MacOS only), Internet Explorer, Opera, and similar Java-enabled browsers. This allows convenient uploads on Windows, MacOS, Linux, Unix and FreeBSD. Under Vista, the ActiveX part of Image Uploader completely inherits the Vista style, including the currently active visual theme.

The uploader GUI elements are widely customizable: you can specify captions or images for the buttons, text for messages and warnings, background images and much more. Image Uploader is easily localizable into any language, and it also ships with GUI translations for 15 locales, including Chinese (both simplified and traditional), Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Russian, Swedish, Turkish, and Ukranian. The sample that comes with the SDK shows how to enable on-the-fly locale switching without reloading the page.

Versatility to Serve Many Industries

Image Uploader provides rich functionality that can be used to solve a variety of specific tasks. This way, the uploader can be used in a wide range of solutions, including Web 2.0, printing, real estate, and car dealer services, medical services, etc. Here, Image Uploader meets the requirements posed both for the upload workflow and for the upload tool itself. To see how the uploader caters for various industries, let us consider some examples:

  1. Web 2.0 projects have a bunch of requirements that are rather different in their nature:

    • Essentially flexible and easily customizable GUI.
    • Client-side thumbnail generation.
    • Capability of uploading arbitrary data along with images and files.
    • Quota for the file and image size in pixels and megabytes.
    • Client-side watermarking.
  2. Printing services mostly have requirements directly related to processing of large images:

    • Working with huge bitmaps.
    • Client-side resize.
    • Handling EXIF and IPTC metadata.
    • Quality meter that allows for choosing the optimal paper size for printing the photos.
  3. Professional solutions for various industries (including e-commerce) require an assorted set of features:

    • Uploading both image and non-image files.
    • Preparing resized images on the client side.
    • Client-side file compression.
    • Quota for the size of both files uploaded at a time and for a single uploaded file or image.