CharlesLloyd's dashboard

I have found the task of creating a DeepZoom collection (or whatever its called) to be tedious, as well as time and space consuming. I was thinking this should be done lazily by a dedicated DeepZoom server rather than entirely preprocessed. So, rather than chopping up a given large image into thousands of small images and creating a huge directory tree, it seems a DeepZoom server could be given a single image and serve up the pieces on demand, caching as needed.

Perhaps this could even be provided as an Apache module.

Just fyi, it took almost 10 hours for me to create, preprocess, and upload my panorama collage. The resulting directory tree was over 14,000 images and 535 megabytes. I started with 10 tiff files with would probably be about 100 megabytes as very high res jpegs. If I could just upload the composition and have the DeepZoom server pick out the pieces it needs on the fly, it would lower the inertia of creating and maintaining these DeepZoom images.

I created a DeepZoom collage by placing several large panoramas into the composer pane. However, I wanted to be able to add captions to each panorama so the user could know where each panorama came from. Also a title at the time would be nice as well.

I suppose I could create small images myself to accomplish this, but ugh.

DeepZoom is similar to Google Maps in that you can zoom in to see more detail in a given area of a very large image. However, google maps changes the data set as you get closer and closer. Of course, their application dovetails very nice with this idea and its not so clear how DeepZoom might do this, but I am thinking that the user might be able to take a wide shot of a scene into which you can zoom for more detail of that scene, but then in specific regions, once you've zoomed as far as reasonable, the image switches to a different image that would have been shot from much closer.

For example, I have a panorama of the Painted Desert which contains some logs of petrified wood. I took a panorama of that scene, but I also walked over and took some close ups of the petrified wood. And then I took some macro shots of the grain of the petrified wood. I would like to be able to add those additional photos as layers underneath the panoramic layer than can be exposed as the user zooms in. Of course, some indication would need to be added to the pano image to tell the user where the more detailed shots can be found, but that's a detail (albeit an important one).

I would like to share my DeepZoom collections with others. Would be great to be able to submit urls that others can browse.