The Dreaded Seadragon to the Rescue!

Had some interesting development on current project where customer requested to be able to allow user to view huge JPEGS from their portal. Deep Zoom in Silverlight comes into the picture, and was discussed extensively in the project.

Two key problems though:

1. Deep Zoom Composer provides a simple and easy way to create deep zoom image collections, but provides no simple way to automate it when user uploads large images into image library in SharePoint.
2. We are kind of afraid that Silverlight, as the viewer, might  not be as easily available in controlled corporate environment at this moment

Spent the weekend with Deep Zoom, and found out that there were APIs available to create deep zoom collections using .NET codes, Bryant had a great blog post on this:
Deep Zoom Image Generation with DeepZoomTools.DLL

Had to do more test for applying it into ASP.NET (SharePoint), but, fundamentally, it should be workable. This should solve part 1 of the problem.

For part 2, the handy Deep Zoom composer provides the answers straight away. It showcases a way to generate Seadragon Ajax viewer to view a single Deep Zoom Image.

Some study on the generated html files found out that it is extremely simple to generate seadragon into web page:

Basically just by creating Seadragon.Viewer on a container DOM element and calls openDzi passing in the xml files generated by ImageCreator.

One thing to note, Seadragon, as the time I tested, only supports one single image (no ImageColelction generated xml support). But, well, it works for me ;) Also tested it on Chrome, Safari and Firefox, all works :D

 
Testing Seadragon in a SlimBox2

Zoom babe, zooooom!

Time to convince customer to go for Seadragon, and call it a day, cheers!