Snapshots vs. Tex?

Hi All,

I'm sure this is a ridiculous question, but here goes.

How do you get your SL pictures that you take to be saved as a Snapchot (with the blue and yellow icon) as opposed to a Texture (with the cross-hatch icon)?

I'm trying to get a vendor put together and I need pics of all the objects i want to put in it. I CAN do this without having to upload each and every one from the saved computer texture file, can't I?

Thanks a bunch,
Dag

Snapshot is where you use the SL tool to take a photo which is automatically uploaded (i.e. not saved to a folder in your hard drive). Any image uploaded to SL is a Texture (even if you took it as a snapshot to your hard drive). Other than the icon there is no difference in the way they are treated in SL.

Snapshots saved directly to SL have the blue/yellow icon. Uploaded textures have the crosshatch pattern.

Either way, each upload costs $10L (about 3.5 cents) per upload.

Since you're putting vendor pics together, I recomend that you take a prim, make it 10x10x.5 or so, make the texture blank and the background any color that's not in the item you're photographing.

Place your image in front of the "backdrop" you just created.

Take the pic, and save to your hard drive.

Then, in photoshop, gimp, etc., load the pic, use the magic wand tool to grab the areas not your item, and delete them. This way, you have a clean image of your item.

From there, you can add a background of your choice,apply "special effects" and such, and put info like price, number of prims, etc, on the texture as well, and there's no need to display this info using hovertext.

This will give your vendor images a more polished, professional look as opposed to just rezzing the item and snapping a picture straight to SL. Since either way, you pay $10L, you might as well take the time to give your stuff a professional look.

Hint: Settle on certain features like layout, backdrop, etc, that will be the same from vendor to vendor, and put this in a layer, then past in your cropped image of your item into another layer. Each new item can go into it's own layer, and you'll be able to save this as a layered image. This will give you the ability to make changes, or reproduce a lost image, etc. It also gives you a "base" backdrop to work from, which will be the same from vendor pic to vendor pic.

Hint 2: If 3.5 cents per image upload is outside your budget, you can get away with creating each vendor pic, (all the same resolution.. I use 512x512), and then create a single image that contains each vendor pic side by side. For example, say you have 4 items. Create each vendor pic and save them as 512x512 targas, then create a 1024x1024 image, copy each and create a single image with all 4 vendor pics in a 2x2 setup:

pic 1 ... pic 2
pic 3 ... pic 4

like that...

then, using texture repeats per face and texture offset, you can upload the single image, and stretch/offset the texture so that only one image is showing on the prim. This is a bit of a pain, but if you really really really want to save those pennies, this works just fine. Using this technique, you can easily jam quite a few, but, bear in mind, SL automatically resamples the images, and after a while, you'll start to see image degradation. I'd recomend no more than 4x4 or 5x5 to a single texture. You'd have to experiment to see how many you could do before the image degrades too much. Personally, I just upload each texture, as it's only 10L per, and playing around with the scale and offsets takes more time than just dragging the image onto the vendor display portion.

...thanks so much for your input y'all! Have a great day...I'm off to take pictures.

-Dag