Huge Panorama of London in 1845

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In 1845, the Illustrated London News gave away a hand drawn panorama of the Thames running roughly from Vauxhall in the West to just past Greenwich in the East.

Fortunately, a reprint made for the newspaper’s 150th anniversary, tends to be more affordable, and over at the IanVisits blog they recently acquired a copy – which has been annotated with additional explanatory text. Its really nice that they used our free ImageCutter software to place a high res/zoomable version online - its great.

If you have 5 minutes to spare then we really recommend heading over to IanVisits to take a look and zoom around.

Picked up via spatialanalysis on Twitter (worth following).

Microsoft Seadragon: Point to an Image and Process - 3D Tube Map

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Microsoft have revamped their http://www.seadragon.com/ service and its quite impressive in terms of sharing high resolution images online.

Below is our 10000x5000 pixel render of the 3D London Tube Map - it enables you to zoom in enough to see the parts we need to fix :)



If you have Silverlight installed it should zoom in nice and smoothly, if not it should use Ajax so we would be interested in any thoughts on its performance.

Set up is as easy as pointing the service at a online image, it then processes it and makes it as simple as adding in a one line script to a blog post / web page. We are not sure however know where it stores the images so if its a photograph you don't want sitting on a Microsoft server somewhere you might want to use other alternatives - such as our Image Cutter :)

Google Maps for Fine Art: The Kremer Collection and Image Cutter

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Our Image Cutter Software was made to take giga size images and share them quickly and easily over the web by simply embedding imagery on top of Google Maps.

As such we assumed it would be used by panoramic photographers, architects and perhaps a few geographers. It turns out it has also been used by medical imaging experts and more recently to share and display fine art courtesy of the Kremer Collection.

The movie below provides a quick insight into how the site works:


Image Cutter: Displaying High Resolution Images on top of Google Maps from digitalurban on Vimeo.

The Kremer Collection is owned and managed by the Fondation Aetas Aurea (FAA). The collection comprises 17th century Dutch and Flemish Old Masters. The collection contains 48 paintings and copperplates by Dutch and Flemish masters. Many great figures are represented, including Hendrick ter Brugghen, Gerrit Dou, Frans Hals and Rembrand.

It is really nice to see the software used in ways we had not previously envisaged. You can find out more about Image Cutter and downloaded a copy (its free) from here.

Thanks as ever go to the National Centre for e-Social Science who funded our project.

Image Cutter - Panorama Viewer

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Neil Creek has used our labs (CASA) Image Cutter software to view a stunning panorama online, as the live example below demonstrates (you can close the preview window by clicking on the bottom right hand arrow, navigate using the standard Google Map interface):



The software is aimed at easy viewing of giga pixel images over the web without the need of a plugin. Using the Google Maps interface it 'cuts' up the image into thousands of sections and then creates a web template which can be modified for own usage or embedded into a blog etc.

Take a look at Neil's site for more panoramas and thanks for the comments on the software so far Neil. If you would like to try it yourself,download version 1.1