Attached pictures becoming embeddded in page,

I have been playing with the new version of FogBugz (V3)and have found that if I attach a picture to a bug it embeddeds it into the page and not as a linked document.

The problem with this is that the picture can screw up the page formatting so that it looks a right mess and not easy to read.

I have attached zips and txt files and they are shown as links.

Is this a feature of FogBugz or should jpgs be links not embedded pictures.

Jon Tresadern
Wednesday, November 6, 2002

The embedding is a feature, but we weren't aware that it was messing up any formatting. Can you email me a screen shot showing what you're talking about?

Joel Spolsky
Wednesday, November 6, 2002

Sorry should clarify what I mean.

We run many of our debug apps @ 1600x1200 and if we wanted to add a screenshot to show to the developer the problem on screen, an embedded image of 1200 deep causes the page to overflow the screen when viewed at a lower res of around 1024, which is what some of the managers run at.

If this is a designed in feature I can get the users to zip up the images before adding them to the bug log, so they don't cause the log to be excessively long in length when viewed on smaller screens.

Jon Tresadern
Wednesday, November 6, 2002

We are facing the same. An option between inline presentation and opening in a separate window should help. Or the script could decide, based on some crude rule as the image size (or better).

Jozsef Toth
Wednesday, November 6, 2002

I'm going to check into the possibility of scaling the image to fit if it gets too big.

You can always click on the picture to get the full, unscaled image.

Note: if you are using IE 6.0, it scales the picture down for you automatically unless you turn off this feature.

Joel Spolsky
Wednesday, November 6, 2002

In ASP if I need to rescale images I callout to mageMagick(open source image manipulation routines). It nicely scales images on the fly.

Have a look at imagemajick.

Matthew Lock
Wednesday, November 6, 2002

We were thinking of just doing it with client-side javascript in the DOM after the fact... Disadvantage: the whole image is downloaded (although if you then click to expand, it's faster). Advantage: less strain on the server -- resampling large JPGs is slow no matter what you do and this could cause a busy server to go ballistic.

Feedback?

Joel Spolsky
Wednesday, November 6, 2002

If you were doing it server side you could cache the resizes so that they were only done once.

Matthew Lock
Wednesday, November 6, 2002

Assuming that attached images are predominantly screen-shots, a scaled down screen-shot is pretty useless (all the text becomes unreadable, etc.).  To keep the image both useful and size-constrained how about a window (IFRAME perhaps) that only shows a clipped region of the image which you can pan.

Ken Klose
Wednesday, November 6, 2002

How about a thumbnail preview, much like windows does and then if you click on it you it opens a new browser window with the fullsize image.

This feature could be an option either per user or all user, with others such as:

Embedded
Link
Thumbnail Preview

Any thoughts on this?

Jon Tresadern
Thursday, November 7, 2002

I've done a tiny poll in the company and the end result:
- no hidden automatic decisions on the sw side please (people want to control things).
- if needed, decision between inline/link presentation should be based on browser window size
- thumbnail is OK - why not generate thumbnails silently on the server side (once and for all times)?. That should not overload the server.
- Please do not create panning solutions: it's like peering through a keyhole. (A lot of DTP software do that, and it's most annoying. Especially if the picture loses focus - no way, please.)
- per-user behaviour setting is also OK

Jozsef Toth
Thursday, November 7, 2002

thanks for all the feedback!

We'll try to find some reasonable solution that we can do in time for the next incremental (3.0.5) relase.

Joel Spolsky
Thursday, November 7, 2002

Sounds good to me.

Thanks for the prompt replies to my queries.

Cheers

Jon

Jon Tresadern
Thursday, November 7, 2002

Everyone here likes the inline images (in fact, it was a feature request of ours).  We find that screenshots almost never need to include the full screen and can generally be cropped to a reasonable size.  We much prefer being able to see the picture at the same time we are reading the case information.

I do understand that inlining a 1600px image is probably not helpful, and in fact we did suggest that this feature could be limited to some smaller size.

But I didn't want Joel to assume that everyone is against this. :)

Chris Dunford
Thursday, November 7, 2002

I think it is a useful feature in some circumstances and not in others, which is were per user or per site option selection would be nice.

Jon Tresadern
Friday, November 8, 2002

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