A good way to display large images online

Question

I need to show an image that is 4000x6000 px. What are your experiences with displaying large images online?

My initial idea was to use the GMap cutter and the Google Maps API to show the image. GMap Cutter takes an image and cuts it appropriately for use as a google map. My problem with approach is that the image will be changing often, and so I'll need to re-cut the image often. GMap Cutter doesn't have a command-line version, so I can't write a cron job for this...I'll need to do it manually every hour or so. Is there a better option for doing this?

Or any other solutions I can consider?

Answer 1

Scrollable div/iframe/pop up window?

Could use something like Mootools Scrollable to scroll the image around easily?

Or are you more worried about downloading an image that size in one go?

Answer 2

how about using something like this:

http://www.zoomify.com/

Answer 3

I'd recommend slicing it up with ImageMagick. It allows cropping via a view port and is fairly configurable. In addition it works fairly well from a Linux/Windows command prompt (or within Perl,PHP or Python using exec).

http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/

Here's the documentation for the actual tile crop functionality.

http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/crop/#crop_tile

With options to crop using gravity, the ability to adjust the size/quality of the output image and support for virtually every common image format ImageMagick should get you done.

Answer 4

The GDAL2Tiles utility, which is a part of GDAL, can be easily automated via command-line.

There is also a GUI for it, called MapTiler. They have some info on running GDAL2Tiles here.