Seadragon: a nifty online viewer designed for very large images
Seadragon.com from Microsoft Labs is a free web service designed to view, zoom, pan-into, and share large images on the internet without degrading them or otherwise making them smaller.
I had two reactions here: the first was … wow! cool!. The second, I was initially wondering what the point of this was, exactly. If you are asking the same question, the answer is that this is built to view really large images; which is to say images with enough detail and visual data to make it worthwhile zooming in, panning, and doing all the cool stuff that Seadragon can do. More notes below:
- Fullscreen: can maximize to fullscreen (click on the icon in the bottom right).
- Images: can be used on images found on the web. If you want to use your own images, upload them somewhere first. Remember that its designed to view really large, hi-res images.
- Sharing links: Seadragon will provide a URL that you can send to and share with others.
- Embedding in a website: Seadragon will also provide the code you need to embed the image and in a page. You can modify the code to customize width and height.
See it in action below
Note: I’ve had this image on my hard drive for a while and unfortunately do not remember whence it came; cannot give credit.
The verdict: a nice toy to play with. It is perfect if you have large images that you would like to view or share without making them small and “internet friendly”, and for panoramic images as well. This is also a great way to publish images of artwork, commercial brochures or scientific images that may be rich in both visual information and text.
Compatibility: a modern browser.
Go to Seadragon.com.
[...] Seadragon: a nifty online viewer designed for very large images Found 1 hour, 59 minutes ago pa hrefhttpwwwfreewaregeniuscomwpcontentuploads200910SeadragonScreenshotjpg targetselfimg classalignright srchttpwwwfreewaregeniuscomwpcontentuploads200910SeadragonScreenshotpreviewjpg border0 altSeadragon Screenshot hspace8 width200 height172 alignright aa hrefhttpseadragoncom targetblankSeadragoncoma from Microsoft Labs is a free web service designed to view zoom paninto and share large images on the inte From: http://www.freewaregenius.com [...]
Samer:
Thanks for the article. This is very cool.
Until I read your article, I didn’t know anything about Microsoft Labs or the work they were doing, like Seadragon.
Seadragon is real easy to work with too.
Nice work!!
Steve B.
[...] first read about Seadragon at http://www.freewaregenius.com, in Samer Kurdi’s article, Seadragon: a nifty online viewer designed for very large images . Check out Samers article. The photo he used is huge. Thanks for the article Samer [...]
[...] Freeware Genius Votar [...]
This is a really good software to play with.
[...] see the big picture and then zoom in to see the detail. I originally heard about Seadragon through a post over at Freewaregenius and I wanted to take the information to the practical level by showing how to use Seadragon inside [...]
Wow, what a great app !
And what a great view of “Notre Dame de Paris”
I can almost see Quasimodo in the roof of the Cathedral
Thanks for this one !
Rgds, Brousse.
Hey look! It’s Google Map… er… image… something… ;P (Truly though, feels like I’m using Google Maps on a picture.)