Image Magic

OSC Image Magic is a powerful new contribution for OSCommerce designed to greatly improve the way your images are displayed. At the core of its functionality is the ability to produce smoothly rendered thumbnail (smaller) versions of your store's product images. In addition, it also contains a very comprehensive toolbox of 'on-the-fly' image watermarking and processing functions to both improve your images and, perhaps more importantly, protect them from theft and unauthorized use by your competitors, ebayers and the like.

Features
- Image Thumbnailer - Image Magic will generate a smaller, much higher quality thumbnailed version of your product or category image before it is served to your customer. Not only will will your images look a great deal better than they did before, but your pages will load significantly faster and store will use less expensive bandwidth.
Image Magic will automatically maintain the aspect (width to height ) ratio of your images, so that out or proportion product images will be a thing of the past. You only have to set a maximum width or height and image Magic will work the other out.
- Server Caching - Image Magic uses very sophisticated techniques to ensure that your images load lightning fast. One of these is a server caching mechanism which means that once a thumbnail is produced for the first time, a copy of it will also be saved on the server. Rather than having to process and thumbnail the same image over and over again for each visitor, the cached copy will be sent instead. Image magic will automatically categorize your cached thumbnails under a separate folder in exactly the same way you have them categorized in your images folder.
Server caching can be switched off if you have very limited server space.
Browser Caching - Another method Image Magic uses to give your site a speed boost, is to send special headers instructing your visitor's browser to make a locally cached copy of each image they view. This will have the effect of greatly cutting down the amount of repeat information you send each visitor and will mean your pages load much faster.
- Automatic Cache Maintenance - Image Magic can detect old cached files which are no longer needed and automatically delete them from the server.
- Admin Configuration - All configuration options are in the Admin Panel (Configuration -> Image Magic) rather than having to be set within the script header.
New Intermediate Sized Thumbnails - OSC Image Magic now introduces an extra thumbnail size which you can set from your admin panel, and which will be applied to the thumbnail images shown on your product information pages. Previously these were limited to being shown as small sized thumbnails, which were very often not suitable.
- Output Quality Settings - The output quality of JPEG thumbnails can be specified for the various thumbnail sizes. This will mean much smaller file sizes so that your pages will load faster and use less bandwidth.
- Image Watermarking - You can protect your images by embedding a semi-transparent graphic in them, such as your store logo etc. You can set the position, and transparency of the watermark within the thumbnail, and specify which thumbnails you want the watermark to appear in (such as only the large pop-up images)
- Text Watermarking - You can use text watermarking instead of, or in addition to graphic watermarks. You can also upload your own Truetype fonts for use in your text watermarks, specify the colour, transparency, size and angle of the text and control which sized thumbnails to apply it to.
- Image Filename Encryption - You can choose to encrypt the filename of your source images meaning that your visitors will never be able to see the actual filename of the images being served from your store. In combination with the watermarking functionality, this feature makes your images practically theft proof.
- Brightness and Contrast Adjustment - Thumbnails can have their brightness and/or contrast increased or decreased by a user defined amount. This will happen on the fly.
- Thumbnail bevelling - Thumbnails can be given a raised or receded 3D button effect on the fly. Precise control over button height/depth and 3D colouring is available.
- Thumbnail Framing - Thumbnails can be given a 3D frame with a wide variety of styles and colours.
- Transparency Preserved in Thumbnails - If you use images with a transparency channel or colour, this information will be fully preserved in the thumbnailed version.
- Internet Explorer PNG bug workaround - Internet Explorer contains a well documented bug which messes up the alpha channel transparency of 24-bit PNG images. This contribution now has an option to switch on a work-around to this issue so that these types of images will display correctly.