Question about images,pixels and sizes (not file size, but pixels)

Hello,

I am new to zen cart, have looked through all of the forums and read the stickys, and I am still a bit confused.
I have just installed zen cart on my local machine using xampp. I am ready to start populating my database with products. I have imagehandler4 installed. No lightbox or other image plug ins yet.
I understand that imagehandler does not resize images, but makes it so that you only need one image as opposed to three different images (one for each size).
I want my site to be something like this: http://www.apsara.us.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=23&sort=20a&view=columns&alpha_filter_id=0
The thumbnail is one size, then click on any of the products and the image is a bit bigger, then click on the larger image link, and it's larger.
The images I get from my vendors range from 390x390, 390x480. 92x150, etc.
Do I need to resize all of the images? I have tried to resize them to 800X800,(to accommodate the largest size) but not only is that a lot of work to do on thousands of images, but many come out very distorted and pixelated.
What am I missing? I don't understand what size to make my images, or is there a plug in that will take care of this for me?
Can I use the smaller images from vendors and somehow use a plug in or line of code so the images are displayed the proper size?

Thank you

Sharon

Here's how images work in Zen Cart, without using any addons of any sort:
http://www.zen-cart.com/content.php?100-how-do-i-add-multiple-images-to-a-product

If that suits your needs, then you may not even need ImageHandler.

DrByte:

Here's how images work in Zen Cart, without using any addons of any sort:
http://www.zen-cart.com/content.php?100-how-do-i-add-multiple-images-to-a-product

If that suits your needs, then you may not even need ImageHandler.

DrByte,

Thank you for your quick response, however, this didn't exactly answer my question, perhaps I didn't phrase my question correctly, or don't know how.
I have read the above tutorial, and my understanding of it is : You take an image (one size), change the extension and add _lg or _med, and then you place them in their respective folders (thus needing 3 images, one in each folder). Where as with Imagehandler, you only need one image and it adds the extensions on the fly, and you only need to add it to one folder
I guess my question is: If my image is say, 290x350, and I upload it to my images folder, then regardless of whether I do it the way you described or if I use imagehandler, in order to produce the larger image of say 750x600, does my original image need to be at least 750x600, or will zen cart be able to take my 290x350 and produce it in the correct larger image?
I know that I can go into admin>images and tell it what size I want, but does my image need to be a certain minimum size in order to correctly render it to the larger sizes.

As I stated earlier, the images I receive from my vendors vary in size, and I need to know if I need to edit them to be a certain pixel size, other than optimizing to reduce file size if they are too large.

Thank you again,

Sharon

Image resizing is not magic. If you have a small original, you cannot make it larger without it getting blurry and pixelated. That is just physics. You must have an original at least as large as the biggest size you want to display.
IH does make the three different sizes of image that you specify from your original, but does it behind the scenes so you never touch the copies, and the filenames are incomprehensible hash tags. If you have a lot of images, get new products/images on a regular basis, and want all images treated the same for sizes, IH would be a good way to go.