About the "Pola Wall"


To show my pictures, I wanted to do it like it was polaroids © pined on a wall.

Picasa got this feature named "Collage", unfortunately, once the picture is processed, you can do nothing more than display it... (and doing the Map by hands (in the HTML terminology) to click on each part of the collage to display the picture is a crazy thing to do !)
But, I wanted to do it... without the pain !

So, I decided to write a program to do it.
A program able to create the final picture and the generate automatically the Map part after processing the picture with a clipping taking account of the depth, operation which I'll call Z-clipping.
Finally, I found by accident firt the blog and after a program coded by Romain Guy and called "Photo Collage".
(For the little story, I was looking for the reason of the disappearance of a french computer science magazine (Login Magazine) where Romain was a little bit the one-man orchestra and finally I found his blog )

If "Photo Collage" was doing nicely the collage all the remainder must be added.
Like for example, the possibility to get the pictures coordinates once the are "glued", essential precondition to achieve the Z-Clipping !
The possibility to load pictures was too, one of the first necessary feature to include. Indeed, the Romain's program was using pictures pre-loaded and stored in the jar.

But Romain had the great idea to allow people to download the source code of the program (java+swing). So, I was able to add all the features I needed :
  • Load my pictures.
  • Compute polygon coordinates after affine transforms to mimic those made on bitmaps.
  • Do the Z-clipping to generate the final clickable areas.
  • Save the final picture of the Collage.
  • Add an "undo" button.
  • Choose/change the background color.
  • Z-Clipping one-click test to screen.
  • Generate automatically the HTML MAP + javascript function calls I need.

The concept is simple :
  • 1 - Drag 'n drop your pictures.
  • 2 - The program will compute automatically the final clickable areas. The final clickable areas are displayed in red and the border is underlined in blue.
  • 3 - The program will generate the MAP + the resulting picture of the collage
  • 4 - You only need now to cut and copy the MAP in your HTML File
Illustration : How the Z-clipping is achieved (see picture below). The case when the clipping results with several sub-areas is handle (see picture on the lower left).













How to use it + Map Generator program : it's there