Introducing the Deep Zoom module

A new month, a new face and a new module.

Realityloop has just released the Deep Zoom module, a module that provides the ability to create interactively viewable high-resolution images using the Microsoft Deep Zoom file format and the Seadragon Ajax library, ala Zoom.it but hosted 100% locally.

So what does that all mean?

From time to time I like to workout my camera skills and put together a panorama/360 photo built with a composite of 50+ high resolution photos. This usually results in a extremely high resolution photo with a file size of 50mb or higher, which makes it very hard to share with others over the internet as who has the patience to wait for a file that large to load, especially when you won't get the full benefit of it anyway?

Zoom.it is a hosted Microsoft service that will chop up your high resolution image into many smaller images of multiple zoom levels, allowing the image to be viewed interactively via Silverlight or Javascript. This is all great, but it's a hosted service and it brands your photo, which for many can be a deal breaker.

It occurred to me a few months ago that this could all be recreated in Drupal as a contrib module, but making time isn't always as easy as that. Enter the State Library of Victoria, whom for which the hosted service was a deal breaker and were happy to sponsor the development of said contrib module.

How does the module work?

There's two main components to the module, the creation of the Deep Zoom image using the Image Style effects and the Batch API engines, allowing for large images to be processed without worrying about PHP timeout, and the viewing of the Image via either a Image field formatter or a Text format filter using the Microsoft Seadragon Ajax library.

In the case that a user accesses the un-processed Deep Zoom image a pre-defined fallback Image Style will be used to render the image instead.

A picture is worth a thousand words.

See it for yourself here:

Try it out yourself.

Head over to the project page and download it now.