I am in the process of putting together a system that will digitize microscopy images for use in teaching veterinary students at UC Davis. The TIFF file sizes that will result from this process will range from about 50 MB to more than 500 MB (perhaps as large as 1GB). I think that flashpix can be a help with presenting these files to the students and allowing them to zoom into the images as they please.

We will want to be able to make the files available via the Web and via CDs.

What is the best software to use for

1) converting the TIFF images to the flashpix format

2) serving the flashpix formatted images over the Web

3) viewing the flashpix formatted images from the Web

4) viewing the flashpix formatted images from CD (DVD?)

The viewing software needs to be relatively inexpensive because each student in the class will need to buy a copy.

We are thinking about using Photoshop to add text and do minor touchups on the images but the memory overhead required by Photoshop is huge (3-5x the file size) especially for a 500+ MB file.

Do you know of another application that can do minor image adjustments and not require the large memory blocks used by Photoshop?

Thanks you for any information that you can offer, Frank

-- Frank Ventimiglia (ffventimiglia@ucdavis.edu), August 05, 1999

Answers

Hi,

First of all, shouldn't you be using DICOM as your image file format? =)

Anyway, to answer your questions...

[1] LivePictures has a FREE batch converter but I am not 100% sure if TIFF is supported.

[2] LivePicture also has an Image Server but it is not free - it costs a lot of money. You can try to check out http://www.milo.org for a free IIP solution but it is still under development.

[3] Viewers are available for free also at LivePictures.

[4] Viewing the images on CD (offline) can be done with Ulead's free PhotoImpact viewer or the FlashPix viewer of PictureWorks. You can also use the viewers from Livepictures to view the image locally using a web browser.

G'luck.

-- Rommel Feria (r.p.feria@ieee.org), August 06, 1999.