Three Ducks' Shopping Cart Fabric Images

I thought you might be interested in knowing how I prepare my fabric images for the shopping cart. It is quite a process that can take hours depending on how many bolts are in a fabric line. The Cocoa Express, Ravenwood and Indigo Berries lines each had 13 bolts and it took almost four hours for each line.

The first step is to square up the end of the newly arrived bolt of fabric and then I cut a half metre piece. I can use this later for fat quarters or fat eights. I then press the cut piece and fold it over twice to make a smaller square to fit the scanner. I scan each fabric into Paint Shop Pro at 200 dpi (because I want as much detail as possible), straighten it if necessary and crop it to 1355 x 1355 pixels size and save this square using the fabric order number. After all the fabric in a line have been scanned, I then re-open each fabric scan  and make four duplicate copies of the scan and close the original. From those four duplicates, I will make four different sized images: 100x100, 125x125, 200x200, and 400x400 - all at a resolution of 90 pixels/inch. Here is how this looks on the PSP worktable...

 The 100x100 is the first image you see in the cart, the 200x200 is the image you see when you click on that fabric to see its individual listing and the 400x400 is for the pop-up window - the ruler gets added before I reduce the image to 400x400. The 125x125 (not illustrated) I use for the fabric line combo picture on the blog.

The next step is to produce .jpeg images of each image size and here I have found you do all the 100s first, followed by 200s and then the 400s. The trickiest part of this whole process is naming the three different 'jpeg sizes for Zen cart because the cart requires the images be placed in three separate files and the naming has to be exact to associate the medium and large images with the smaller. The small pic is given a name like this: f_A4880-K, the medium size gets named f_A4880-K_MED and the large pic is named f_A4880-K_LRG. There can be no mistakes otherwise my poor webmaster has to go into the files and hunt for the pic and rename it. You can just image this process when there are 30 fabrics in a line - like Coverntry! I write down each fabric number and check off each jpeg image size as I make them. I save the .jpeg images in three separate folders in 'My Pictures' and the folders are named according to size (eg. Cocoa Express 100s, Cocoa Express 200s and Cocoa Express 400s). I can upload the 100s myself into the  cart along with fabric information; however, I must send the 200s and 400s to my webmaster who then loads those images into the cart's image files.

You can now understand why I paste my three little duck logo onto all my images! It is easy to "borrow" a website's images and if someone is going to "borrow" my images I want the whole world to know about it - well, the quilting world anyways. So, if you ever see my little "duckies" on someone else's site, you can tell them that 'borrowing' Three Ducks web images isn't very nice and that Anita has a cousin named Vito ...LOL.