Product Image Construction

[dw08gm]

I sell a range of printed products, where one design can be printed onto different base products or strata, such as tshirts, cards and ceramic tiles (to name but a few), similar to the www.cafepress.com system.

What I am seeking is software to automatically generate product images on the fly, not unlike the watermark system, but where a design image is laid over a base product image, and then maybe a watermark laid over both.

Such a method for creating and displaying the possible variations in product images would considerably reduce the amount of product images required to be drawn, uploaded and managed (eg 10 designs upon 10 products would require only 20 images (10+10) rather than 100 (10x10) images).

For proper functioning, the software must be able to resize a design image to suit the product image, preferably by percentage.

Also a tick box would be required to link designs with base products, and perhaps vice versa.

Does anyone know if such software already exists for zen cart.

TIA

[kuroi]

Most of this can be done by creating transparent product/design images and giving them a background image that reflects the product type.

However, when you start talking about the need to adjust the size of the image, this gets an order of magnitude more difficult, as you would really need a server side image library tweaking the image before it is delivered if you want it to look good in the visitors browser. Though that at least would give you a way of adding a watermark, but I don't know of anything this specific already in existence for Zen Cart.

[dw08gm]

For server side image library, I was thinking a mysql table with the following fields:

design image,
product image,
% width, (100% = product image window)
% height (ditto if not proportional)
align left/right/center or % right (default left)
align left/right/center or % bottom (default top)

As the base product image by default prescribes a maximum window for any design image, and as the design image itself has prescribed dimensions, the % width/height should satisfy most arrangements. Otherwise a new image could be generated for a particular product.

With design images smaller than the available window in the base product image, alignment becomes an issue.

It would be great if the software was incorporated into Image Handler2. Maybe I should copy this post to that thread.