A major update!
Getting to this release has been a lot of sweat, and maybe a few tears. While there are some big user-facing changes, most of the work went into reorganization and stability improvements behind the scenes. This was one of those projects where the minimum scope was not evident most of the time. I tried to build smart, but there were some things I over-engineered and some things I under-engineered. For version 3, I took the time to look back over the work and make edits with hindsight. While the interfaces with external websites didn't change, pretty much everything else did. More work is done in background scripts, communications between the popup and the background scripts are vastly simplified, and the architecture required for more sophisticated functions was built.
Thank you so much to Jayce and Shelby for being my beta testers. Your input and encouragement has been invaluable.
New features!
- Adds exterior walkaround 360 and interior panorama 360 image captures. These are the two features I'm most excited about!
- Quickly select the 360 images that you want with a shopping cart-like interface.
- View exterior walkarounds in a click-and-drag interface. No need to sort through a folder of 50+ images for the ones you want.
- View interior panoramas and get high resolution captures. No more browser screenshots!
- Note: the "correct" output resolution is up for debate. 360 cameras give us flat images with a "universal" perspective. When we change that perspective, the density of original pixels is different in different parts of the image. There's no one-to-one "best" resolution for the result.
- Currently, images are rendered at 1944x2592, which is based on the original size of IAAI's cubemap images. This could be changed, or even made configurable. In any event, it's a lot better than screenshots!
- Adds a Copart/IAAI selector to the popup.
- If one is selected when you click search, only that yard will be searched.
- If one is selected when you click download, you will actually get downloads from that website. Previously, if Copart and IAAI shared a lot number, the Copart images would be downloaded, and the IAAI images ignored.
- Organizes images into folders. This is a small detail, but an important one, especially as the number of images you have access to increases.
- Please note: just like before, if you download the same images twice, you'll get duplicate files mixed in together.
- Web extensions are intentionally limited in what they can do to your computer! They cannot see what files already exist in your downloads folder. This is a good thing. :)
Updated features
- Adds panorama/walkaround downloads to Copart.
- If you used one of the later 2.x versions, you got raw images from IAAI, but not Copart.
- Fixes IAAI downloads. It looks like they no longer serve VIN search results, and they did a minor change to their image information variable names.