TechnicalNotes

Dezoomify uses the Python language to organise and execute the downloading of the image tiles, and jpegtran to stitch them together losslessly.

Zoomify hierarchy

Zoomify objects present on one page (let's say www.site.org/gallery/zoomify_page_1.html) draw on resources in another part of the site to construct the image. These resources are:

• The Zoomify tiles, little square images that are pieced together to make the image you see in the Flash applet. The are divided into folders (TileGroups) of 256 tiles.
• The ImageProperties.xml file, which holds vital information used in constructing the image (i.e. width and height)

The image folders and the XML file are contained in a "base directory". This is an entirely separate web directory, and could even be on a different website! Let's say our example base directory is www.site.org/images/zoomify/1/. The XML file is then located at www.site.org/images/zoomify/1/ImageProperties.xml, and image tiles are at www.site.org/images/zoomify/1/TileGroup0/0-0-0.jpg and so on.

So, the base directory is the important location. Dezoomify will get all the data and images from there, and the display page is just the gateway page that Dezoomify uses to find the base directory to make your life easier.

The Zoomify hierarchy looks like this:

• /BaseDirectory/
  • /ImageProperties.xml (contains info about the number of tiles and tile size)
  • /TileGroup0/ (contains first 256 tiles)
    • 0-0-0.jpg
    • .....
  • /TileGroup1/ (contains next 256 tiles)
    • X-X-X.jpg
  • .....