A boring name this time ;-) Image Zoom

Some time ago, I learned that I have quite some reputation for coming up with weird names for H5P content types. Not this time 🙂

The University of Saskatchewan hired me to create a new one for them, and they absolutely wanted it to be openly sourced, so other people can use it, too. Thanks for that! Those are the projects that I want to work on! Oh, yes, the name. It’s ImageZoom, so it should be pretty obvious what it does …

Try using your mouse wheel while hovering over the image, or try the arrow keys, the ‘+’ key or the ‘-‘ key … Are you using a touch device? Nothing will happen, because you can pinch zoom already which is way more convenient then for you.

Options

Don’t like it that way? There are a couple of options that you can use to tweak it to your needs:

  • Choose a different image 😉 It doesn’t have to be this one of the lovely Sommarøy in the north of Norway.
  • Select the image width and position (useful for those who cannot control the width of H5P content on their platform).
  • Change the zoom lens size.
  • Decide not to darken the background when zooming.
  • Decide not to zoom automatically, but to require the user to activate it.
  • Decide to not show the little zoom indicator in the lower right corner – but it’s useful to have it there as it’s the button to toggle zooming if you’re controlling the content type with the keyboard.

Want to use it already?

I’ll ask the H5P core team to review the content type and to release it on the H5P Hub, but this process usually takes some time. If you want to use the content type right away, just download the demo content above via the Reuse button underneath the content, and then upload the .h5p file onto your H5P platform in the H5P Hub. That will install the required libraries if you have permission to install H5P libraries – if not, your system admin will need to help you with that.

Future development

My contract work is done. H5P.ImageZoom is done (unless I missed some bugs). I’ll gladly maintain translations that will certainly trickle in soon via the great translate-h5p.tk by Sebastian Rettig, and I am pretty sure that I’ll tweak the content type once in a while on my own time. Please understand however, that I cannot give support or implement your feature requests for free all the time. The code is openly sourced and freely available for you to download, so other people can improve it, too! Well, and I am for hire, of course …

3 Replies to “A boring name this time ;-) Image Zoom”

  1. This is pretty nifty (I heard from JR you were working on something for them). It took a bit to figure out the zoom on my laptop trackpad was two finger up/down, like maps. Afraid to report on iOS 15.2.1 I do not get a moving rectangle of focus.

    And yes, I get your message about not taking feature requests, so maybe I will dive in. I did something long ago on Mozilla Thimble (now on glitch) where you could move around an image and “save” clips to a roll https://photo-photo-story.glitch.me/

    I’m envious though and respect that you keep adding tools, regardless of naming

  2. Hey Alan!

    Yes, trackpads may be tricky. You can use the plus key/minus key as well. And you’ll not get anything on iOS or Android, please see the blo post 🙂

    “Are you using a touch device? Nothing will happen, because you can pinch zoom already which is way more convenient then for you.”

    So it’s not a bug (that I’d fix, of course), but indeed expected behavior.

    Best,
    Oliver

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