Image Uploader 5.0 is released

I have great news for you! We have released Image Uploader 5.0 at last.

This new version is more stable, there are many interesting features in it. We have really made a great work on it. You can read the full feature list here. As for me I would like to tell my own thoughts about this new version. Some time ago I started making a list of ideas to be added and problems to be fixed in Image Uploader. Some of the ideas were difficult to be done but we understood that we have to do it. Here is a list of the features which (as I think) our clients will like:

  1. Vista native view – first version of Image Uploader with Vista support (no crushes, correct upload) was v4.1. Starting from v5.0 for ActiveX it has native view on this operating system. Now we are using Vista interface drawing APIs. As for Java version, we are waiting for JRE with Vista look-and-feel to be implemented.
  2. Configurable POST request format. Let me describe what it means. Image Uploader had its own sequence of fields (FileCount, PackageIndex, PackageCount and so on) with concrete names (e.g. Thumbnail1_1). It was not very convenient in some situations:
    1. If you wanted to insert Image Uploader to any content management system (CMS) he should write your own upload processing code even if there has been upload functionality before in this CMS. Some our clients have even ordered a private label versions with custom field names to avoid CMS scripts changing.
    2. If you wanted any open API to store your images on flickr.com or similar site you had to write some complex upload processing scripts to resend images after upload to flickr.com in the target website API proprietary format.
    Now you are able to rename any field in POST request or even turn all textual fields of to add only your own in format that you need.
  3. Full thumbnail generation classes rewritten in Image Uploader for Java. We and our clients have been waiting for this for a long time. The most inconvenient thing in Image Uploader for Java is its thumbnail generator which was not as stable as everybody would like it to be. We have spent a lot of time trying to find any image processing library but were not successful until recently. Our testing has shown that almost all the problems were while making thumbnails via JIMI. When thumbnails were made via ImageIO almost everything was OK. Thus, we decided to disable JIMI usage in Image Uploader for Java (by the way, as a result ImageUploader5.cab is 100 kb smaller than ImageUploader2.cab). As a result Image Uploader for Java supports less image formats but we have found a solution to add additional file formats support for our clients who need it. I will describe additional format support feature in my future posts. So by now Image Uploader 5.0 uses only one image processing library, ImageIO. As for resize modes, we have made a lot of testing on tons of images and made appropriate parameter sets for all resize quality modes.
  4. Zip compression feature. That is not only one more supported format. We have added the ability to specify how to save bandwidth for any type of files. Before Image Uploader 5.0, there was only the ability to resize images and make JPEG thumbnails. Now it's possible to specify for example to make JPEGs for all image files and Zips for all other or make JPEGs for all files and on fail make Zips, or make JPEGs and on fail send original files (remember FallbackMode property? ;) ). So now Image Uploader helps to compress not only images but also any other type of file.
  5. Other features are important too and I will try to describe it in my future posts.

Anyway, hope you like the new version of Image Uploader!

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