Star Zoom Atomiser is an image processing tool that prepares images for use with Star Zoom. It is included in the Star Zoom download package.
It takes large high resolution images and 'atomises' them into the hundreds or thousands of individual 'tiles' that Star Zoom requires.
For convenience, it will batch process an entire directory of images in one go.
Atomiser is a Java application, which means it should run on any system (Windows, Linux, OS X etc.) that has Java installed. Many systems already come pre-installed with Java. If yours does not, you can download Java here.
Image processing can use lots of memory, and Atomiser is no exception.
For example, a JPEG image, 10,000 pixels square (100 megapixel image) might only use 10 Mb of storage on hard disk. However, this relatively small storage requirement is due to the fact JPEG images are highly compressed.
When the image comes to be processed, it must be expanded to its full uncompressed size. So, for a 100 megapixel image, you have 100,000,000 pixels * 4 bytes per pixel (32 bit colour) = 400Mb. That's 40 times larger than the storage space used on the hard disk just to store a copy of the image in memory. Then there are additional requirements beyond that for processing.
In practice, a typical 2Gb-4Gb setup will suffice.
Use either the Windows batch file (run.bat) or the Linux shell script (run.sh) to launch Atomiser. You can edit these files to increase the maximum memory allocation if required.
Uploading lots of converted images to your web server by FTP
can be slow. You can significantly speed up the the process by first
compressing your images into one file (e.g. ZIP). The compression won't
be significant, but only having to upload one file will save lots of FTP overhead.
You can then uncompress the file on the server (you may need need shell access to do this depending on your hosting company
e.g.
$ unzip images.zip -d /zoom-images)
