How to display image preview without downloading from given url using PHP? - php

So I'm working on a project to fetch images from fashion websites. Now I'm implementing the add item function in the website. In this function, user needs to input website url first, then the web scraper will scrape the target images' url and pass the urls to the curl to download the image. Finally the add item popup window will preview the images I fetched in the previous step and ask the user to fill out some basic information for the items. Everything works fine except that the curl will take a very long time to download the images (cuz the images from those fashion website are often very high-quality). So I'm wondering is there a way I can create a preview without actually downloading the full-size images and do the download when the user fill out basic information later. Thanks!

If the fashion website has smaller versions of the images, you should download those first. You can use them for your preview.
If the fashion website only has the full size image, there is no way to download a smaller version of it.
You probably know what your doing, but remember that you should respect the copyright of images on websites, especially art websites such as fashion websites. Be careful with what you do with them.

Related

Add title screen to video on upload to YouTube via API

I currently use the YouTube API to allow website users to upload their videos through the site straight to our YouTube channel (adding META data etc) at the time of upload.
Ideally we would like to dynamically add some sort of title, watermark, opening screen or an image to the beginning and / or the end of the video. Essentially we just need any method of adding something to the video which adds some form of branding to it (even if just a plain company name at the bottom).
The uploads are from internal users (i.e. secure and trusted) and there is not an excessive amount so I would be happy to upload to our server first (instead of straight to YouTube), manipulate the video then upload to YouTube.
The site runs PHP on a dedicated Linux / Apache server setup.
Any suggestions greatly appreciated
Thanks
Here's a really quick and easy one: Invideo Programming. Invideo Programming lets you add a small logo to a corner of the video, or promote another video in a different corner, or both.
You can add this to the API via the Channels resource as as invideoPromotion attribute. We recently did a show on Google Developers Live explaining how to configure this on both the web UI as well as in the API. Check it out - I think this'll do what you need.

Preview video from thumbnail

Recently stumbled upon a stock video footage site http://www.pond5.com/stock-video-footage/1/*.html , and saw that they had a preview of a video when the user hovered over a thumbnail. I want to recreate this, because it seems like useful practice and it will allow me to workout my web developing muscles.
I would like to be able to preview a video when a user hovers over a thumbnail.
For example like pond5.com. Audio is not necessary, but I would like it to look smooth like a video rather than a video preview that contains a frame every 5 seconds.
On pond5.com, I originally thought they used a gif, but it plays very smoothly. Some also contain audio. As far as I thought, audio can't be used in .GIFs
Is this a case where I would have to just upload a 2nd video for the preview?
Thank you for any help.
Pond5, the website you specifically mentioned, creates a video thumbnail with watermark and lowered quality and stores it. It is then played back using JavaScript to dynamically load a div element that contains the flash player. So no GIFs are involved. You do need to upload a 2nd video, but the steps to this project are as follows:
Server-side video thumbnail/watermarking: Not sure if there are any PHP packages that are up to the task on this one. I would write a more powerful program in C++ or C#. If you go with C#, quick and easy solution would be Microsoft Expression Encoder.
Flash/Silverlight/HTML5 video player: To play the video.
Client-side JavaScript: To load the fancy popup and the aforementioned video player. Note that you might need to use PHP and a database engine to load the thumbnail URL for the video requested.
This is what Pond5, and what many other stock-footage sites use, and the basic outline of what you would need to do to achieve similar results.

A Responsive Photo-wall Gallery with Swipe Functionality

I'm looking to build a javascript/jquery gallery that meets the criteria below, and would love to know if there are any existing gallery modules that have all/most of these features:
1. Photo wall with zoom (single view) functionality. eg. http://tympanus.net/Tutorials/SlidingPanelPhotowallGallery/
2. Responsive, so that the photo wall images tile properly for desktop & mobile devices, and reshuffle if the user resizes their browser. eg. http://isotope.metafizzy.co/
3. (optional but desirable). If a user is on a mobile device, allow them to swipe through single-view images.
In a nutshell. A user will go to the thumbnail wall, select an image, and can then either swipe through more enlarged photos, or switch back to the wall.
The photos will be sourced from a folder on the server. Moderators are simply camera girls, who will upload images from their digital cameras to this folder via ftp - They wont resize / optimise the images, so it would be great if this could happen in the process somewhere too.
We are hosting on a PHP / Linux environment.
Have a look at jQuery Mason: http://masonry.desandro.com/
It can be used as a responsive wall.
What your asking for is not called 'zoom' (that is another effect), you seem to what what is called a lightbox. There are a lot of these, here is a comparison, http://planetozh.com/projects/lightbox-clones/
To re-size images your going to have to write some php to make use of image GD or imagemagick, here is a tutorial, http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/php/image-resizing-made-easy-with-php/ or possibly a script, http://shiftingpixel.com/2008/03/03/smart-image-resizer/ (or timthumb.php).
For serving them your going to have to write some php with your javascript.
There is no all in one solution for what you asking for, you're going to have to write it or hire someone to do so.
As far as I know you have to create a plugin or write you own jquery functions for getting all customized features.(that will be very good in sense of performance and maintenance)
for zooming functionality you can use some of the modal windows with ajax call or you can create.
to achieve this you have to write good css so that your photo aligned according to screen.reshuffle will be handled if you write good css.
yes you can achieve this by detecting the browser navigator and changing the css and javascript accordingly.
For pre processing images(re sizing,dynamically generating thumbanails) you can opt for php backend solutions.
And no worries you can handle images from folder via Ajax and show them as they requires.

Get website image from google via php

I'm working on a website for a specific client. And he wants to be able to add link to the website, and on mouse hover to have a image of that website appear.
Now, he doesen't want to take an image of the website, he only wants to input the link and have the website do everything else.
So my question is ->
Is there a way (eg. google API) to get a website image only by providing the url via php?
Sort of like in google, when you hover over a lik of a page, a tooltip pops up to the right with an image.
Any help is, as always, appriciated :)
Here is a list of 10 free thumbnail services
http://www.webresourcesdepot.com/10-free-website-thumbnail-generation-services/
You can simply refer to the URLs of these services, e.g.
<img src="http://SnapCasa.com/Get.aspx?code=[code]&size=[size]&url=[url]" />
or make a CURL call from one of your PHP scripts and temporarily store/permanently save the image that was generated.
Have recently developed Thumbnailspro.com. It is currently free to use while in beta testing as we work out the bugs, but so far its getting quite popular, you can request thumbnails directly from your website using the code below :
http://thumbnailspro.com/thumb/http://msn.com&s=150
s=Size, size can be anywhere from 10 to 1000 pixels just add s=300 to display a thumbnail 300 pixels in width. We are trying to add more options as we go for thumbnail requests and at the same time trying to keep it as simple as possible so you don't have to enter something like the code below to get your thumbnails :
http://somethumbnailsite.com/viewurl.php?url=http://msn.com&x=200&y=300&bwidth=1024&bheight=768&rotate=76&what_the_hell%20_is_all_this_crap!
So is much more effecient!
Like the service or have any bugs contact us at admin#thumbnailspro.com!
No. The only way to do this is to request the HTML for the page, render the page and then create a thumbnail from that page render. Google does this because in the process of spidering the web, they already get all that data, and they've got a nice optimized rendering engine (Chrome) that they can put the data through, and then they've got tons of online storage space to store the cached image. There's a lot of work there, though.

How can I generate a thumbnail of a web page for a facebook post?

My app is posting to users' Facebook walls, and linking to a page they have created. The page is in html. I'd like to be able to put a thumbnail of the page as the image on the wall post. I'm not sure whether this is possible or not. Anyone have any ideas?
If it helps, the page itself is stored as a series of 'elements'... for each one, I know the size and position of the element, and the content (which may be text or an image). So I can pull all that in from the database.
I guess it would be sufficient to create a thumbnail using php at the point when the user clicks 'Publish This to my wall', if that's easier than doing it on the fly - I can save the image and then link to it.
Any ideas?
I create thumbnails for my site using CutyCapt, which works very well indeed on both Windows and Linux. You can use exec to invoke this from php.
There are also web services that allow you a quota of free thumbnail snapshots, that are easy to integrate into your website. e.g.
http://www.websnapr.com/
or
http://webthumb.bluga.net/home
I figured out how to do this. I used the PHP gd library, which allows you to create a base image and then add images and text. Works pretty well.

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