Getting Started

If you’re interested in installing IIPImage on your own servers, you should read this section first.

Basically, IIPImage is a client/server system which will require the installation of the IIPImage server on your host machine and the use of one of our viewers on your web page. Images can be in either TIFF or JPEG2000 format.

Server

The IIPImage server is a feature-rich high performance imaging server designed for streaming extremely high resolution images. In addition, it is capable of handling advanced image features such as 16 and 32 bits per channel colour depths, CIELAB colorimetric images and scientific imagery such as multispectral or hyperspectral images and digital elevation maps. It is cross platform and works on Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, Solaris and various other UNIX type systems. You can either download a pre-built binary for your platform or compile yourself.

The server is designed to be embedded into a web server as an FCGI service and is compatible with Apache, IIS, Lighttpd, Nginx, Myserver and probably many other web servers. Installation of IIPImage, therefore, requires you to have administration rights to your web server.

Linux / UNIX / Mac OS X

Linux, Mac OS X or other UNIX style users should compile the server and follow the installation instructions here.

Windows

Windows users should just download the binaries. It is also, of course, possible to build it yourself using Visual Studio.

There are instructions on how to install with Apache on Windows. To install with IIS5 or IIS6 on Windows, see this tutorial on IIS5/6 support. For IIS7, see this detailed tutorial on Installing IIPImage on IIS7.

Images

OK, so you now have a working IIPImage server. You now need some images to serve. Images must be in a tiled multi-resolution format such as TIFF or JPEG2000. For details on how to correctly generate and host your images, see the documentation on images.

Viewer

If you want to be able to view your images using a pan and zoom viewer, you will need to add a compatible viewer into your website. The native IIPImage viewer is IIPMooViewer, which provides full access to the server’s features. It is fully cross platform and works in all major navigators (Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera and Internet Explorer).

The IIPImage server, however, supports multiple APIs: IIIF, Deepzoom, Zoomify and IIP. Any viewer that is compatible with any of these APIs can be used. For example OpenSeaDragon and OpenSeaDragon-based viewers such as Mirador and UniversalViewer. Leaflet, OpenLayers and many others. See the viewers page for more details.