Zoomify .zif format bad performance

Question

The new .zif single file format provided by Zoomify Pro seems to have some performance issues. Comparing it to the old file structure it loads the page 3 to 4 times slower and the requests that it sends exceed 50% more (Tested with the same initial image in multiple file formats).

Using the old format is not feasible for out product and we are stuck with over a minute of load time.

Has anyone encountered this issue, and are there some workarounds? The results in the internet and the official site doesn't seem to be of any help.

NOTE: Contacting the vendor hasn't led to anything yet.

Answer 1

Although the official site claims the zif format could handle very large image, I'm skeptical about it because the viewer tries to do everything in Javascript. The performance is entire based on the client's machine. Try opening it on a faster machine and see if it improves.

Alternative solution: You could create Deep Zoom Image tiles by using VIPS library.

More information here:

https://libvips.github.io/libvips/API/current/Making-image-pyramids.md.html

Scroll further down in the article and you'll see this snippet:

With 7.40 and later, you can use --container to set the container type. Normally dzsave will write a tree of directories, but with --container zip you'll get a zip file instead. Use .zip as the directory suffix to turn on zip format automatically:

$ vips dzsave wtc.tif mypyr.zip

to write a zipfile containing the tiles.

Also, checkout this tutorial:

Serve deepzoom images from a zip archive with openseadragon https://web.archive.org/web/20170310042401/https://literarymachin.es/deepzoom-osd-server/

The community (openseadragon and vips) is much stronger over there so you'll get help when you hit a wall.

If you want to take a break from all of this and just want the images zoomable, you could use 3rd party service such as zoomable.ca or zoomo.ca. It’s free and user friendly (upload your image and embed the viewer to your site like Google Map).

Answer 2

ZIF format designer here... ZIF can easily handle monstrous images, up to hundreds of terabytes in size.

Without a server, of course the viewer tries to do everything, it's the only option. As a result, serving ZIF directly from a webserver will not be as performant as using an image server. But... you can DO it. Using Zoomify tile folders, speed will be faster, but you may have hundreds of thousands or millions of tiles to deal with at the server side, and transfers will be horrendously slow and error-prone.

There are always trade-offs.See zif.photo for specification.