The Correct Choice Of Tools For A New Deep Zoom Application

I want to create a new application. It will basically be a Deep Zoom application that users can draw annotations on (that will save to a DB so other users can see those annotations

Solution 1:

I wrote a Deep Zoom app that supported annotation for a proof of concept a couple of years ago.

I used Django for this, however it is not approach I would recommend. If i was doing the same job again I would use CanvasZoom, which is based on HTML5. Canvas Zoom can be embedded into a webpage through javascript. There is a guide on how to do this here:

a link

Unfortunately you need to run Microsoft DeepZoom composer on the original image first in order too generate the deep zoom data that CanvasZoom will use. If you want your app to run in a browser it is likely that you will have to go for the following approach.

1. User selects image.
2. Image gets uploaded to server
3. Server creates deep zoom information
4. Use a PHP based approach so you have a canvaszoom page for the image.

The annotations will probably complicate matters, I did this with javascript when I attempted it. The trick is to work out when the image has been zoomed in (with canvas zoom there are preset zoom levels) and redraw the annotation regions. I found this approach non-trivial but not overly complicated.

Canvas Zoom is MIT licensed, so you can do what you like with it.

Good luck with your project.