Upcoming Features

The past week I've been working day and night readying the website for launch. Now that the thing is up and running, I can spare some thoughts on future development. There were a number of features that were conceived but that I decided to put off implementing. By far the biggest one is the generation of higher-resolution mosaics.

Currently, the site generates mosaics as 5120x3840 JPEG files (or somewhat shorter, depending on the aspect ratio of the source photo). The resolution is larger than most people's monitors. If you print one out on your inkjet printer, you'd get roughly 500 DPI. The result will look decent. For printing in larger formats though, that's inadequate.

In theory, the system can generate mosaics that are 8 times wider. Instead of resizing tiles to 128x96, I can make each of them 1024x768. That should yield enough pixels for printing a 36" by 24" poster at 1200 DPI. JPEG files that are 40,000 pixels aren't terribly practical, of course--the server would run out of memory creating them. PDF is the file format of choice here.

I happen to have quite a bit of experience with PDF. I will probably code the software from scratch instead of using an existing package. Should be fairly straight forward. The PDF file will basically contain a couple thousand individual JPEG files, with commands to arrange them into a grid. Given the large file size, I'll probably set it up so that the images are processed as the file is downloaded.

As there's no completed mosaics yet, I should have plenty of time to work on this before it's needed.

Another feature that'll likely appear in the near future is the ability to adjust the GPS location of photos. It's probably be a button that unlocks the pin on the map, allowing you to drop it where it really belongs.