Lotus Connections teaches you how to scale images in Java

Lotus Connections is a little bit screwy when it comes to profile pictures IMHO as they are being forced to be square in Profiles (115×115 pixels). In profiles search results however they are scaled to 55 pixel in width and height is automatic…

In my mind portrait pictures are rectangular and not square.

Yesterday this gave me some grief as I was at a customer where I had to write Java code to import pictures in the PHOTO table of the Lotus Connections PEOPLEDB database. The actual importing the pictures into the database is easy using JDBC but the pictures showed up wrongly in Lotus Connections as they were rectangular (200 x 133 pixels). They clearly had to be scaled but how – clearly not manually!

As with many other things you are gifted with Java as it already contains all the pieces you need to scale pictures. I quickly found some sample code on Google to use java.awt for the resizing. The solution was to

1. Scale the source image from 200 x 133 pixels to 115 x 76 pixels to keep the aspect ratio
2. Create a new blank white image sized 115 x 115 pixels
3. Place the resized source image on top of the white image centered
4. Upload the resulting image to the database as a byte array

Love Java!