cross platform embeddable large image viewer

Question

I'm looking for a system with which can embed a zoomable image in a web page. This is for an educational site and the images are x-ray photographs - so we'd like to display the image full size then allow the user to zoom in to see the detail. The final images won't be that large - I think 2048 square should cover it - but large enough we don't want to display everything at once. Something like MrSid would be ideal.

ideally we're after a FOSS system, and one that should display on PCs and Macs - and ideally linux too. Java or Flash based would be fine. Certainly nothing that is IE only (although has to work on IE)

I would imagine anything suitable would be language independent, but for the record we're using PHP.

Answer 1

Microsoft Silverlight offers Deep Zoom (similar to Google Maps).

While not FOSS, the client is free (as in beer), supported on PCs and Macs in multiple browsers, and support for Linux is underway via the Moonlight project.

The Express versions of the development tools can also be downloaded for free (as in beer).

It doesn't require any server-side support (except for a web server to serve up an HTML page containing an OBJECT tag pointing to your Silverlight app).

Answer 2

Similarly, MrSID Browser Plugin is free as in beer and runs on Windows and OS X.

http://www.lizardtech.com/download/dl%5Foptions.php?page=plugins

One would think that setting up a server app to serve up Object/Embed tags to instantiate the "ExpressView" plugin should not be rocket science.