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Comment by ohnonotyouagain | Hacker News Reader

On a technical note, the Art Institute of Chicago images are being served using an API called IIIF, which allows you to scale, extract regions of interest, etc. [1]. There are about 1-2B images worldwide being served from museums and libraries using the API [2] and viewers that can work with the content from multiple institutions at the same time, for instance to compare two van Gogh self-portraits from different museums: http://projectmirador.org/demo/

[1] https://iiif.io/api/image/2.1/#image-request-uri-syntax [2] https://iiif.io/community/#participating-institutions

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Interesting. There seams to be no way to get a list of available images or a search though. How would one us this API without info about available images?

Or am I missing something?

Here's the link for the search API: https://iiif.io/api/search/1.0/

This Search API is focused on searching within IIIF content (think full text search of a book). There is currently a Discovery Working Group[1] looking at broader discovery of IIIF resources.

[1]https://iiif.io/community/groups/discovery/

I think using IIIF is why this site is so broken.

Trying to load an image sends 50 separate requests, when the entire image is less than 400kb. This is the exact opposite of what web optimizers try to do, which is combine lots of small images into 1 large one and use clever CSS to show small parts of the image in the right places on the webpage..

Whether to tile the image (or use client-side CSS) is entirely up to the developer. If you want to show regions of interest from large objects, it's much better to be able to extract the ROI as an independent image. For example, this scroll is nearly 100Kx4K pixels: https://dpul.princeton.edu/eastasian/catalog/1z40kx353#?c=0&...

Yes, that's fine for images like that, that's several GB in size, but there's a cut off point where tiling becomes less efficient and slower than just downloading the whole image in one request, I'd guess it's around 1/2MB, which a lot of images on this art site are.

Even if the actual efficiency is no where near that, a 1080p jpg fits in that so it's not like people would want the IIIF functionality on images that small anyway.

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