ZoomHub

Zoom.it is a Microsoft project which does exactly what you'd think. It zooms an image in and out. It runs on the Windows Azure cloud computing framework and the client-based Silverlight, which you should probably download from Microsoft if you don't already have it installed. The primary idea here is to allow massive enlargement of HD images, to view very fine details in small areas. Microsoft claims successful processing of images of 2Gpx (two thousand megapixels), though apparently there's no guarantee that images beyond 500Mpx will process satisfactorily and you'll have to experiment. For most people, that should be enough, I'd think. The operation of the application is simple, and requires you only to enter a URL and let the app do the rest. The URL may be a link to any image in a format that Windows would normally recognize, plus SVG, and even PDF files. The app then displays an image rebuilt into its own "deep zoom" format, and some clicking and mouse scrolling on your part does the rest. As the image is zoomed, it's redrawn to the new size, and you can move it around, map style, to isolate small areas. OK, that's cool enough. But you can also feed it the address of a webpage, which it will go fetch and convert into its own format, and then allow you to treat in exactly the same way as you would had the file been saved as a standard bitmap image originally. Of course a webpage isn't going to be as finely detailed as an HD image of many hundreds of megapixels, but you'll still be able to blow it up quite considerably. Here's the SJ front page captured from my browser. It began at only 1024 x 768 resolution, so there's no very deep magnification, but you get the idea. http://zoom.it/5Z2k A second and cooler method is to set up the provided bookmarklet, which allows one-click translation of whatever's in your browser window, into an image, including the parts of the page that aren't currently visible. Aside from the opportunities offered by the combination of zoom.it and your favorite p*rn site, anyone working with large panoramic images, maps, or geological imagery will find this to be an interesting toy. It does a better job than simply using the zoom function in an image manipulation program, assuming you have the capacity to load a 2gigapixel image into Photoshop anyway, and needs no further software. I zoomed a 2mm area of a sample image up to 100mm, a 50x magnification, and it was still sharp. Mind you, that was a 400+ megapixel image to start with, but it's still pretty impressive. Try the sample images to the right of the home page to see what I mean. The first downside is that Zoom.it will not recognize Photoshop PSD images, nor, I assume, Paintshop Pro files or any other proprietary image format. These will all have to be converted to a format Windows will recognize, though at least you aren't confined to using lossy JPG files which aren't going to get any better when you zoom them. And secondly, it will not accept files from your own hard drive since all addresses have to be preceded by 'http' or 'https'. So you will need to upload images to Flickr or some other online repository, first. If this develops into a desktop app that does allow you to view files locally, it will become a lot more interesting. Not bad, Microsoft.