Evening Nick,

Thanks for your support, in all senses. I sent email to you just now that bounced, so could you send me an email so that I get a verified address? I need to discuss something with you.

Can you cut out the intermediate browse resolution step. I ALWAYS want the full image and bthe browse is a waste of time and a download penalty for me.

Sounds like you have a high-resolution monitor. 1024x1024 barely fits on the common 1024x768, without leaving room for thumbnails and controls. I'll give it some thought--maybe all it needs is a checkbox that selects full-res over browse, and goes directly to the popup overlay.

How does one combine frames from different days into a long animation?

Darn good question. As somebody observed recently, the rovers in reality creep at a glacial pace (you can see the shadows move in the animations!), and a journey of a thousand centimeters can take a sol. It would be nice to be able to make an animation covering several sols.

Had another Epiphany™--it won't be that hard, the idea isn't to make an animation by selecting lots of images scattered through the catalog; rather, the idea is to be able to chain several animations created from individual sols.

Which leads to:

The solution to your animation saving issue, IMHO, is to generate an animated gif, rather than a sequence of images. That can then be either stored on your server or downloaded and saved locally after viewing. If stored on Server, you can link to it (and in fact most people will be generating the same sequence again, so you can have it pre-generated).

Can't be animated GIF. Did you know that Unisys owns the patent on the GIF compression method, and would want thousands of bucks from me to license it on one Web site? Yikes! Besides, animated GIFs are huge, leading to long download times and horrendous bandwidth consumption.

I've already been mentally plotting out the second method, storing an image sequence in a database. You'd get a URL containing the ID# of the stored sequence. A database would nicely support the ability to chain together multiple animation sequences. Like I figured, this all implies a registration system so you can see just your own stored animations and not be inundated by everybody else's.

I hadn't thought of the certainty that many people will create the same animations. Addressing that would require checking all the animations already stored, and given the long image IDs used, that would be rather unwieldy. I think I'll just have to accept the duplication.

Thanks for all the useful feedback, Nick.