Ever wanted a deep zoom image of a huge image already uploaded to the web? Now you can. The Seadragon team in Live Labs has released a service that lets you easily turn those pictures into nice zoomable UIs: Seadragon. Seadragon is built on Azure and gives you the following benefits:
- Images always load up really fast, no matter how big the image is
- You can zoom and pan smoothly to every detail of the image
Furthermore it is so smart it even determines if it is being watched on a computer/device with Silverlight installed or not because it uses parts of Seadragon AJAX for its rendering. If no Silverlight is found it will default to using AJAX.
The usage is simple, you just type in the URL to the image and it will be converted for you. Next you can share the result on Delicious, Digg, Facebook or Twitter. Want to embed or just need the URL to the image, the embed code and URL is also given after completion of the conversion.
Now this is a very nice service for single images. If you want to make complete albums there is still DeepZoomPix (hosting, until December 31st 2009) and the Deep Zoom Composer, which allows you to either upload to DeepZoomPix or export.