Handy Tools Complimentary to Deep Zoom Composer

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Deep Zoom Composer is a tool that allows the preparation of images for use with the Deep Zoom feature in Silverlight 3 and higher version. While the tool provides the user interface to compose an image with one or more images, it is often desirable to complete the same task with a scheduled task (without opening to tool), or to process a large number of images with an automated batch process.

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While Deep Zoom Composer doesn’t provide such features out of the box, you can either create  and use a custom tool, or some third-party tools, to complete the tasks aforementioned. This post provides some detail on the tools based on information that my colleagues (Scott Hanselman, Tim Heuer  and Nigel Parker) shared with me and findings of my own quick research.

Deep Zoom Image Tile Generation Tool

Starting with the current Deep Zoom Composer release, the product team has retired two tools, SparseImageTool.exe and ImageTool.exe, and shifted to a preview version of a .NET based DLL that provides image generation capabilities. See detail here. Bryant Likes kindly put together a console tool and a Silverlight view solution to preview the generated images. You can find more detail and download the tool from his blog post. I converted his project to a VS2010 and Silverlight 4 RTM version, and made it available for download here.

HD View Utilities

The HD View Utilities are a set of tools that help you create stunning HD View images. This package includes a Photoshop plug-in that enables you to export an HD View Web page or a cross-platform Silverlight Deep Zoom page from within Photoshop. Also included is hdmake, which a simple command-line utility that provides the same function for users who don’t own Photoshop. More info here. You can also view some stunning HD images at the Microsoft Research site..

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JellyFish Deep Zoom

Jellyfish Deep Zoom is open source toolkit for dynamic deep zoom application for silverlight development that oriented to most of system integrators and web agencies. You can download the tool or view a demo of the tool at the codeplex site.

AndreaMosaic

You can use this free tool to create mosaic work with selected pictures. It is available for download here.

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