Programmatically Create Deep Zoom Collections

The Expression team have released a new version of Deep Zoom Composer, and at last they’ve supplied a .NET assembly for creating Deep Zoom images. This has always been possible, using the SparseImageTool.exe that was supplied as part of Composer, but that was never a very good solution, particularly for large collections of images.

We have a potential use case where we’d want to create millions of deep zoom images, and expose these as collections, but without necessarily knowing which images were in a collection ahead of time. Or we might want to add new images to a large collection. Until now, that has always been impossible just using SparseImageTool, but using the new DLL it’s easy. Here’s some sample code which I just threw together to see how the API worked. You need two classes. The ImageCreator class creates individual Deep Zoom images, which was always easy with SparseImageTool. But the CollectionCreator can then take these images, and build a composition of all those images.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Windows;
using System.Windows.Controls;
using System.Windows.Data;
using System.Windows.Documents;
using System.Windows.Input;
using System.Windows.Media;
using System.Windows.Media.Imaging;
using System.Windows.Navigation;
using System.Windows.Shapes;
using Microsoft.DeepZoomTools;
using Path = System.IO.Path;

namespace DZCtest
{
    /// <summary>
    /// Interaction logic for Window1.xaml
    /// </summary>
    public partial class Window1 : Window
    {
        public Window1()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
        }

        private void Create_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
        {
            ImageCreator creator = new ImageCreator();
            creator.TileFormat = ImageFormat.Jpg;
            creator.TileOverlap = 1;
            creator.TileSize = 256;

            List<string> files = new List<string>()
            {
                @"D:\Users\Pictures\DadsArmy\hi000350807.jpg",
                @"D:\Users\Pictures\DadsArmy\hi000350820.jpg",
                @"D:\Users\Pictures\DadsArmy\hi000360009.jpg"
            };
            string root = @"D:\Users\James\Visual Studio 2008\Projects\DeepZoomProjects\DeepZoomTests_Web\ClientBin\GeneratedImages\";
            List<string> dzi = new List<string>();
            foreach (var name in files)
            {
                string output = Path.Combine(root, Path.GetFileNameWithoutExtension(name) + ".dzi");
                dzi.Add(output);
                creator.Create(name, output);
            }

            CollectionCreator ccreator = new CollectionCreator();
            ccreator.TileFormat = ImageFormat.Jpg;
            ccreator.TileOverlap = 1;
            ccreator.TileSize = 256;
            ccreator.Create(dzi, Path.Combine(root, "da.dzc"));
        }
    }
}

You’ll have to add a Reference to DeepZoomTools.dll which is installed as part of Deep Zoom Composer. All this code does is take three hardcoded image paths, generates individual deep zoom images for them, then creates an overall collection of all three.

One thing there doesn’t seem to be is any way to lay out the collection other than having all the images on top of one another, but since any code which makes use of a collection would probably handle its own layout in code, this probably isn’t much of a drawback. And there might well another way to do that – I’ve literally only just thrown this code together, so I haven’t delved very far into what’s exposed.

It’ll be interesting to see what the performance is like. In a perfect world, I’d be able to do a search across millions of images and dynamically generate a collection of a few hundred images in response to a user request, but that might be asking a bit too much.

UPDATE: 9 minutes to process 305 images. 20 seconds to build the collection from those images. 20 seconds is probably a bit more than you’d want for a completely dynamic search, for example, but it’s probably absolutely fine if you’re uploading images to a more static collection like a picture album. 2 seconds to process a typical digital camera image is really rather good. Next test will be some of the really large images that DZC choked on last time I tried it.