Can you Help a Newbie ?? Please

Hi, hope someone can help.

I sell online allsorts of different prints & photos, alot of which i sell mounted ( matted ), or mounted and framed. I want to find a quick way of merging my thumbnailed prints with different colour mounts and maybe my frames. So i can display the different options i offer my products in, also because i have a lot of prints ( 1000+ ) i need a way to do this in volume..

You can record a set of actions so that you can open each image, press the play button on the images pallette, and photoshop will do what you want. There are some tutorials out there about how to use actions. Good luck!

Using actions is one way, but it sounds to me like you might end up with thousands and thousands of possibilities. Then what happens when you add a new color or frame style?

Do you know any Flash programmers? They could easily develop an interface that will take a lot less space and bandwidth on your server, and it will be completely scalable when you add or delete options.

This can be done with HTML layers and rollovers. Take a look at this page:

http://www.dougyfish.com/overlay-test.html

Don't let the complexity of the first part of the html code scare you. Ignore everything in the head section as that doesn't have to change.

There are basically three things on this page.
1) There are two rollover links that choose two different overlay colors.
2) There is a link to the source HTML and images if you want to play.
3) There are two layers. "MainImageLayer" contains the background image. "BorderLayer" has a blank image to begin then is changed to different color images with the rollovers.

In the HTML the "body" tag pre loads the images. The two "div" tags identify where the layers are and what's in them. The two rollover links identify which layer gets changed and what image it gets changed to.

Play around with the code substituting your images and see if it works out for you.

Doug:~