Suggestions for online image manipulation?

[tkdoherty9]

I'm planning to set up a web page that would allow medical students to login, be shown an image (the image would be randomly pulled from a database), put a mark on the image by drawing a small circle or line to indicate a medical problem, then save the image back to the server under a different name. Would Flash be the best approach to this? If so, are their any actionscript examples I could work from? Thanks!

[untitledskate]

Flash would be good for the UI and the interaction, but you have to understand that flash doesnt directly support JPG/image manipulation. When you load an image into flash it will be a flat image that can be rotated and scaled, but not edited. This is my best suggestion:

Have a database of images,
Then when the user logs in, a random image is pulled from the server,
The user will click somewhere on the screen and a circle will appear, then when they submit their answer, both the image name, and the co-ordinates of where their circle was will appear.

Later, you can either automate the answers or check them manually. Manually you would go through each record in flash, pull up the image, tell flash to redraw a circle wherever they did, and you can verify their answer.

You could also save a hot spot in you image database that gives a rough area of where the circle should be. While marking for each answer, it will pull up the correct answer and compare the co-ordinates with maybe +- a few pixels to see if they were correct.

This project will involve some medium AS, php and some DataBase like mySQL.

As far as the AS part goes, you will need to look into:
loadMovie, loadVars and some basic flash->DB interaction. Just search these forums or the tutorials for more info..

Hope this gets you started.