Spotlight: SmartFrame’s Hyper Zoom feature

Hyper Zoom allows you to bring all the details in an image to your audience in an effortless way. Here, we look at how to use it and the benefits it brings.

Hyper Zoom is one of SmartFrame’s most exciting features.

A key pillar of our enhanced presentation suite of offerings, Hyper Zoom delivers multiple benefits for those looking to share and display high-resolution images.

Whether you’re a photographer capturing detail-packed landscapes or a company that wants to let users scrutinize the finer details of their products, Hyper Zoom delivers the best and easiest solution.

What is Hyper Zoom?

Hyper Zoom is a feature included in SmartFrame that allows high-resolution images to be viewed in all their detail.

Whereas most images embedded on web pages have fixed dimensions and no interactive component for zooming and moving around, SmartFrame’s Hyper Zoom feature allows users to easily interact with images in this way.

Why should you use Hyper Zoom?

There are many reasons why you may want to use Hyper Zoom with your images.

If you’re a photographer, you may want to show off the intricate details of a landscape you’ve captured. Or, if macro photography is more your thing, perhaps you want to let people see the finest details on an insect or a flower head. You can try this for yourself by clicking on the image below.

Ordinarily, you might not want an image like this to be viewed or shared at high resolution, as it’s far more attractive to thieves. Many photographers may first downsize such an image to a point where it’s still large enough to be appreciated but not so large that it encourages malicious activity.

With SmartFrame, however, you can share such an image and know that common attempts to steal it – from right-clicks and drag-and-drop actions through to screenshot attempts – will be thwarted.

Hyper Zoom gives viewers a far better idea of texture and structure than an everyday JPEG can communicate. This is also arguably the main benefit for brands who want to use Hyper Zoom on their product pages. Doing so allows users to see what they are considering buying close up: the stitching on a bag or a pair of jeans, for example, or a garment’s fabric.

How does Hyper Zoom work?

When you upload an image to SmartFrame, it’s automatically split into many individual tiles. While it doesn’t appear any different to the viewer, by breaking the image down into many individual components, SmartFrame is able to load only what’s needed when it’s needed.

When a user zooms into the image and moves around, only the tiles that contain the currently viewed information are streamed. When they zoom back out, those fine details stop being streamed as they’re no longer needed.

This means the image can be adapted to the viewer’s display resolution, while also ensuring that your website isn’t hampered by huge files and slow loading times – which would ordinarily be the case with high-resolution images.