Although Aurigma Image Uploader is great for a regular file upload regardless to their type, as you can expect from its name it features special functionality that makes it especially great for image upload. Let’s see how you can use Aurigma to upload photos and other kind of images.
Resize
When organizing pictures upload to a website, it is often you do not need the original file. As usual 640x480 or 800x600 copy is more than enough. Using common upload technologies you will have to resize the image after the upload on the server.
With Aurigma Image Uploader you can resize photos before the upload. It gives at least two major benefits:
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The file size is reduced significantly, therefore you can reduce the traffic and increase the upload speed very strongly (depending on the input and output image dimensions the difference may be as large as tens times!)
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No need to overload the server with unnecessary calculations as image resize is pretty heavy operation.
Pictures upload with resize
You can configure this resize functionality in different ways:
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Upload resized picture instead of the original file.
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Upload small thumbnail + original file.
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Upload several resized copies of a photo with different dimensions.
Learn more about resize feature for photo uploads
It is worthy to mention about the special resize functionality for huge images. With Print or Premium edition of Image Uploader you can create not just thumbnails or 800x600 preview images, but create hi-res resized copies. It is important if you organize photo upload not just to publish these images on your website, but print them on paper, canvas, t-shirt or any other goods.
When the output image has large dimensions is that it requires a lot of memory and CPU resources to resize such picture. However Aurigma implements special algorithm that allows resizing images “on-the-fly” without reading the entire file into memory. It allows creating resized copies of any dimensions from original images of any size.
Learn more about hi-res image resize
Rotate
Image resize is not the only important feature for the pictures upload. Another important task is image rotation. Sometimes people rotate camera to shoot a portrait-oriented photo. However all photos come from a camera in album orientation. That’s why the user has to rotate photos before publishing them anywhere.
If your users upload photos using Image Uploader, they do not need to rotate photos in some separate software. They can easily rotate a photo when they select it for the upload.
Pictures upload with rotation
Moreover, if the camera stores actual orientation along with a photo in EXIF tags, Image Uploader can automatically rotate this photo.
Learn more about photo rotation
Crop
Sometimes it is necessary for images uploaded to a website to have specific aspect ratio. In this case the user has to open the picture in an image editor and crop it to maintain the required proportions. Obviously it makes the image upload process pretty complicated.
What Image Uploader can do about it? The good news is that it has built-in crop editor. The user can open a photo and select an area that should be visible. Before the upload the image is cropped according to the user’s selection. You can control whether the crop frame will have a fixed aspect ratio or it will be free-hand. The crop operation is not destructive – the user can get back to the photo and edit or even cancel the crop settings.
Pictures upload with crop
With some simple JavaScript programming you can do even more tricky things. For example, you can disallow photo upload until the user crops these photos to meet your criterias, or even crop photos automatically!
Learn more about the crop feature
Watermark
When publishing photos online, it is often important to provide some protection to avoid copying them. The simplest way to do it is to put a watermark – an image or text logo put above the published picture.
Aurigma Image Uploader allows automating the watermarking process during the image upload. You just specify what picture or text you would like to put on the image, how opaque it should be, where it should appear, etc. Image Uploader does the rest.
If you upload several resized copies, you can set different watermarking settings for each of such copies. For example, if you can upload small thumbnail without watermark and put it on a preview copy.
Learn more about the watermark functionality
Work with EXIF
All photos created with digital cameras contain portions of data describing various details – camera settings, photo creation date, and even geo location data. All these details are stored in so-called EXIF tags. EXIF tags are often very important for the photo upload process. For example, you may want to arrange photos based on the date when they are taken or, for example, bind a photo to Google Maps.
With Image Uploader you do not have to parse JPEG and extract EXIF fields from it. Instead, Image Uploader can extract necessary EXIF tags before the upload and send them along with files.
Learn more about automatic EXIF field extraction
As a bottom line, imaging functionality of Aurigma Image Uploader is handy for different pictures upload scenarios. You can transfer many imaging operations typically done on the server on the pre-upload stage and make image upload easier for the end user than ever!