Neverside

display part of a very large picture on a web page

I have a rather large picture of a map I wish to display on a web page. The size of the picture is around 10,000 pixels square (at a conservative estimate) obviously this is too big for most people to download in a reasonable time. And so my idea is to split the map up into square blocks of 200 pixels each and display 9 of these smaller pictures in a 3x3 matrix. This would make the map somewhat similar to commercial map sites like streetmap.co.uk and multimap.com. To navigate around the map the user would just click little triangles at the edge of the main picture. I don't need to display the complete map at once or zoom in or out. I have tried using a flash script but the results were not really satisfactory.

I would assume I need to use an array but I haven't got a clue of where to start, and so If anyone has any advice or can point me in the direction of a script or algorithm to start me off I would be much obliged.

I am using PHP and can use MySql if needed

Thanks in advance

nn

Am fairly sure the point of slicing an image was to make it load faster. For example the layout of this site was originally one huge image. They used Photoshop or fireworks to slice the huge image into smaller pieces. Then use css and xhtml to put the image back together. Most people would have broadband these days therefore I think it would be possible to display the whole image on one page but as a sliced image.

There are plenty of tutorials on the net that teach you how to slice an image properly. As for putting it together you can use an html editor like frontpage then place the images in a table. If you like to be standards compliant then you should look into CSS. Again plenty of tutorials on the net. Should you need help then you can post within the client side forum.

Thanks for your answer schoi - I can slice the image OK it just I am a bit stuck as to the best way of panning around the large image and putting the correct slices in with the minimum of programming (I'm not very good at php ).

A look at http://www.streetmap.co.uk will show the effect I am looking for. Enter SW1 as the postcode and then pan left, right, up, down and diagonally.

Thanks in advance

nn