RFC: IMatch Anyhwere™ 2018 Sneak Peak - Downloading

[Mario]

Now that IMatch 2018 is out and slowly saturating the user base I'm back at working on the upcoming release of IMatch Anywhere™ 2018.

One of the most requested features (from companies using IMatch Anywhere but also from normal users) was a feature to download multiple files, or to download images in a specific format or a specific size. This sounds so simple - but isn't...

- If you use IMA to share images with family and friends, you may want to allow your folks to download files directly to their PC or mobile.
- Maybe you want to limit the size or make sure that they can always download JPEG files, even if the original file is a DNG or a RAW file.
- Commercial users may want to offer downloads of files to their employees for directly embedding images into publications, emails or for sending images out to customers.
- Access control (who can do what) is of course a requirement
- If multiple files are downloaded, they should be neatly packed in a ZIP file.
- Some users have requirements for watermarks to protect the downloaded images.
- Some users may want to add text or logos, a background canvas etc.

Basically, a lot of the IMatch Batch Processor functionality, just accessible from a web browser.

I had to think quite a while about this because this simple-sounding feature "Allow me to download images" contains many technological challenges. Even something simple like providing some user feedback while IMWS is running red-hot to produce downsized Facebook-ready images from files in your database was a challenge.

And I wanted to make this as simple as possible for the majority of users. Most users need only simple things, like "Download as JPEG" or "Download at 1920 x 1080 pixel (for TV)).
Corporate users may want to enforce watermarks, logos or text overlays and preset the IMA users with a set of presets to choose from, without any further choices or options: Select preset, click download, done.

On the other hand. looking at the probably 40+ different image size variants one needs when uploading files to channels like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, PInterest and not to speak of corporate or private web sites, we should also have an option for user presets, where users can dial in the width/height, how the image should fit into that box etc.

I think I've found a very workable mix of all these requirements. And IMWS 2018 also contains new features to produce output images with almost as many options as provided by the IMatch batch processor. More than enough Oomph to create the downloads required in typical commercial and private workflows.

I'm almost done with this, just fine-tuning the 'custom' presets and the UI currently. Always a tough part, but thankfully much quicker to do in HTML/JavaScript.

This is how it looks when a user has selected a number of images and the download is running.
Please comment below and let me know what you think. Or if you have special requirements and want to know if they can be handled.