The National Gallery, London has been experimenting with the web presentation of high resolution images for quite a few years. This page present some examples of our work to combine the IIPImage server with Microsoft's Seadragon application to disseminate large collections of images over the web and via the Seadragon IPhone Application.

UPDATE: Since the work presented here was carried out both IIPImage and Seadragon (or Zoom.it) have continued to develop and improve, possibly providing alternative or more efficient ways of achieving the results presented here.

Combining Seadragon & IIPImage

Seadragon provides a clear interface to very high resolution images, allowing the user to smoothly zoom in and out. This is achieved by storing hundreds if not thousands of individual tiles, at different resolutions on the server and only displaying the appropriate ones at any given time. This works well for single images or simple collections of images, but can become more cumbersome to administer when you have larger collections or make use of the same images multiple times in one or more collections. Using IIPImage, as an image server, allows these large sets of individual tiles to be replaced with single pre-prepared images that can be used and reused multiple times.

Further Information

A more detailed description of how this process works has been described here.

Details of the Seadragon IPhone App can be found here and a description of how these collections can be viewed on an IPhone can be found here.

Other examples of how IIPImage is being used here at The National Gallery can be seen here.