Migrating legacy data; image cropping and .picts not previewable?

[oilcan]

Hi all,

I've recently started trying to implement SuperContainer for our solution, which contains many images (up to 3 per record). The main file of the solution was starting to get pretty bloated, and SuperContainer seemed like a perfect solution.

But unfortunately I've been running into a couple of problems. First, some of our images are modified in photoshop. meaningful labels are typed at the top or bottom of the image. And given the size of the web viewers I can have on the layout, it seems to clip some of the top and bottom off of the image. The usefulness of the image is entirely based on the documentation typed onto it by the user, so this is definitely an irritating detail.

And this wouldn't be the end of the world if it weren't for the second problem. Many of the older images put into the database were .pict files. When these images get extracted, they show up in the web viewer (a jpg thumbnail is generated), but are not able to be previewed by double clicking. I was pretty certain that Preview supported .pict images, so I don't know why this is occurring.

So when you have a combination of the image getting cropped, and being unable to preview the image, it makes for an annoying combination. You can technically go and expand the web viewer in layout mode, and if you stretch it enough over all the other items on the layout you could see it then. But the layout is already pretty packed with tons of stuff (3 images and tons of other fields), there is not a lot of size increasing that can be done. I could possibly do something like include a tab control and put large web viewers on each one, but this is obviously not what I signed up for SuperContainer for.

So my questions are, 1, is there a way to explicitly generate a thumbnail image wherein all of the image shows in the web viewer regardless of dimensions? i.e. can I use some instructions to override this slight top and bottom cropping that I'm getting? I don't understand why this would happen in the first place, but since it does, I need to learn a way around it.

and 2, why am I unable to preview .pict images? The combination of these two factors makes SuperContainer a currently unworkable solution for us, until I get them resolved.

I've included two samples here. One is an example image where you can see the text at the top, which in my solution gets pushed off the edge of the web viewer (you can't read the numbers at the top). The second is a zipped .pict image, which will generate a jpeg thumbnail in supercontainer, but which cannot be previewed for some reason.

Thanks for any advice!

cantpreview.pict.zip

Edited August 3, 2008 by Guest

[oilcan]

as an update to this dilemma, I've decided to be a bit more proactive in working toward a solution, and invested some time in working on the layout. I have managed to scrunch other layout elements enough and get rid of unnecessary elements to make the web viewers larger (about 50% more vertical size than original), and now no part of the image appears to be getting cropped any longer. So this dilemma is solved. Now I'm still left with the dilemma about not being able to preview .pict files. any guesses as to what's going on there?

Edited August 4, 2008 by Guest

[Valentin]

were you able to preview the .pict files in the legacy system?

[oilcan]

ok so I've found out some more about what's going on.

The images were showing fine in our database previously, but how the images in question were put in to filemaker containers was done in a particularly unusual way. the images were grouped with text in a powerpoint presentation, and then copy/pasted into the container. This was done with quite a lot of images. And I'm pretty surprised by the whole thing because I didn't even know it would work to try doing that. Though it worked for the containers, there are issues with supercontainer and what was done here.

It's no longer being done quite like that. These seemed to present misaligned text sometimes, and so this person has started doing screen captures of the powerpoint presentation, and then putting the screen capture in the container (this was maybe earlier this year). Many were done on an older version of OS X where the images were saved as .pdf -- it looks like on leopard, screen captures are .png files, which should have no problems getting extracted from a container or coming up in Preview. but these are new computers we're working on now, so that should work for them from here on out. it's just the older things I gotta figure out.

I've duplicated the process, using powerpoint and selecting either just a picture, or a picture plus text, and copy/pasting this into a filemaker container, then trying to migrate this to a supercontainer; it pulls the image out as Untitled.pict, and the result is what I've been getting a lot...it shows a thumbnail image in the SuperContainer but you are unable to double-click to open it in Preview. Preview gives a big fat question mark in Leopard.

so it sounds like a lot of these images are just coming from a convoluted source. If I take that image I included, cantpreview.pict, and put it into a regular container now, I get no image. Dropping it into SuperContainer gives a thumbnail, but you can't preview. Also odd is that if you drop it into Mail, it also shows the image there. but not in Word or humorously enough not in Powerpoint either. so it's very strange behavior all around. I'm not sure these things should be .pict files at all, but I don't know what they should be either. if it's any use to note, the thumbnails supercontainer generates for the image are jpegs, but i'm pretty sure this is default behavior for many image files.

Edited August 5, 2008 by Guest