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The power of dynamic imaging provided by picturem.com

Click to zoom into this poster… see the rich detail. Click-drag to pan around. Keep clicking to get to the deep detail of the image. If you like the image, you should buy it at the Ancestry.com store. I have a framed copy on my wall at home. The scan is excellent – super high quality. (disclosure: this particular image is about 8MB is size. I reduced the size from 50+MB original because I didn’t want to wait for the upload to picturem.com – so when you zoom all the way in, you’ll see a bit of a fuzzy image. The original is sharp.)

 

<RANT>
Visual merchandising on the web is every bit as important as at a retail store. Perhaps more so because you have the ‘virtual’ barrier. Can’t touch and feel. It’s amazing how long it is taking etailers to figure this out. Did you see Amazon’s new shoe and handbag site Endless? They’ve got the idea – even though there’s no zoom, you at least get a detail pan of the product. Scene7 is educating retailers and making a killing at the same time.

What amazed me when I worked for Kodak/ofoto was the lack of merchandising savvy among all those in the online photo sharing retailer space. The screen thumbnails of photos you upload to walmart.com’s Photo Center, Snapfish or Shutterfly would look like crap, and they’d be too small to really see any detail. All too often, people would order prints of a photo, only to find they
had red-eye where the on-screen thumbnails didn’t show it. Guaranteed
returns.

At ofoto, we were plagued with that issue until we fixed it in mid-05 with 2x larger screen images, and again in early 06 with sharpened thumbnails and  zoomable images in the shopping cart. They weren’t zoomable down to 1:1, but it was a step in the right direction. My team worked with a great imaging architect named Ron Barzel on these changes.

Ancestry.com should have zoomable images of the products they sell
on their online store. I have a framed 16×20 print of this image at
home because I found and downloaded the original hi-res file from the
library of congress website in 2003. I then uploaded it to ofoto.com
to print (even before I worked there, though I didn’t print it ’til the
week I left – employee discount). The file is enormous, but if i hadn’t
seen the hi-res file, I’d never buy it from Ancestry or anywhere else
online. You have to see the detail before you make a purchase decision.
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