creating downloadable wallpapers

wallpapers

[wellbornSun]

I'd like to create downloadable wallpapers on my website. Is there any special procedure to create thumbnails that a user can click on to download desktop wallpapers? ow exactly is this done?

[mack]

One way of doing this would be to produce your wallpapers in very high resolution and compressing them in zip files to reduce your bandwidth. You couch then create a low resolution smaller image to allow users to view the work before they download it.

If the user clicks on your low res image they will be taken to a page containing information about the download and a link to actually download the Zip file containing the full size high resolution version.

Mack.

[Duskrider]

Heya wellbornSun,

One of my sites is a wallpaper site. I keep all of my wallpapers in a photogallery (free open source, there are several available - I use CopperMine) that automatically creates thumbnails for each image you upload by using GD or ImageMagick.

GD and ImageMagick are programs that need to be installed on the server you're using, so that's up to whoever is hosting your site.

This is all assuming that you have PHP and mySQL on your server and know at least a little about how to use them. If your host uses cpanel and fantastico, then setting up an image gallery is just a matter of a few clicks on your part. If not, then you can set them up yourself (if you have PHP and mySQL) without much trouble - just follow the directions given by whatever solution you want to use.

If you know a little about PHP then you could actually write the code yourself to get GD or ImageMagick to create a thumbnail of the full resolution image and serve it up to visitors. That is if you don't feel like you need something as complicated as a whole image gallery.

[wellbornSun]

Well, you've got me, because I just started light study on PHP and my SQL. Give me a couple of weeks to really dig into this, because I do really want to add this functionality to my site, which is up and being built as time permits.
Thanx much for the direction.

So I really do have to learn some programming, huh? Me with the purely graphic and design background. I love the curves in this journey.