Thanks for all the recommendations! I've been reading and understanding the problem space better. Here's my summary of what I've figured out.
For this project, there is really only a handful of big images, and simplicity of server-side is a priority -- so I think it's actually okay to pre-render all the tiles in advance, and avoid an actual image server -- to the extent tools can work with this. At first, I thought "Oh gee, this is actually kind of like a mapping problem", and wound up at OpenLayers. I think OpenLayers could be used for this non-geographical purpose -- with "units: pixels" -- but it's definitely a complicated product (without particularly extensive documentation), and beyond feeling pretty confident that it would be possible to use it like this, I hadn't actually managed to arrive at a demo. Then I eventually found OpenSeadragon, which a couple other people in this thread suggested, which looks like a pretty good fit. It looks like it possibly can work with entirely pre-rendered tiles served statically with no image server, using the "DZI" format. (http://openseadragon.github.io/examples/tilesource-dzi/). I haven't actually gotten to a proof of concept here, but I think it'll work. I didn't mention that the next phase requirement/desire was annotations on the image. It looks like there's a tool called Annotorious which has some (beta) support for annotations in both OpenSeadragon and OpenLayers. So my current plan is trying to pursue a proof of concept using OpenSeadragon and Annotorious. There are some potential future phase requirements which might require multiple layers, which I guess might require trying OpenLayers after all. (My sense is that Annotorious' OpenLayers support is currently a lot buggier than the OpenSeadragon support though). Thanks again for the suggestions! Very helpful. I may be back with more questions. Jonathan ________________________________________ From: Code for Libraries [[email protected]] on behalf of Esmé Cowles [[email protected]] Sent: Friday, July 25, 2014 4:44 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] very large image display? We previously used the Zoomify Flash applet, but now use Leaflet.js with the Zoomify tileset plugin: https://github.com/turban/Leaflet.Zoomify One thing I like about this approach is that it minimizes the amount of Javascript code the clients have to load, since we use Leaflet.js for our maps and it's already loaded. -Esme >> -----Original Message----- >> From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of >> Jonathan Rochkind >> Sent: Friday, July 25, 2014 10:36 AM >> To: [email protected] >> Subject: [CODE4LIB] very large image display? >> >> Does anyone have a good solution to recommend for display of very large >> images on the web? I'm thinking of something that supports pan and scan, as >> well as loading only certain tiles for the current view to avoid loading an >> entire giant image. >> >> A URL to more info to learn about things would be another way of answering >> this question, especially if it involves special server-side software. I'm >> not sure where to begin. Googling around I can't find any clearly good >> solutions. >> >> Has anyone done this before and been happy with a solution? >> >> Thanks for any info! >> >> Jonathan
