Configuring the IIP image server for Talia

The IIP image server is a server that lets you display, view and zoom large images. It is very good for large images, but using it requires you to install some additional tools and software.

Installing Vips and ImageMagick

The image server uses so-called "pyramid" images, which contain the same image in different resolutions. This allows the "viewer" software to load only the piece of the image that is currently needed.

To create those images, a software called VIPS is needed. In addition to that, Talia also uses the ImageMagick library for some image transformations.

Vips

If you're on Linux, you should, in most cases, be able to install it through your preferred package manager. For the Mac, we have made an installer package which contains both VIPS and the IIP image server itself. In all other cases, check the VIPS homepage for your installation options.

ImageMagick

This software package is widely used, and if you check their homepage there should be installation options for all platforms. Again, for Linux you will find it in your distribution's package management system.

Iip Image server

The Iip server is an fastcgi inside Apache (or another fastcgi-enabled web server). If you're on a Mac you'll be able to use the installer package (the same as above!). You MUST install the vips package first, as the server depends on libraries in it. After that, you should be able to got to http://localhost/fcgi-bin/iipsrv.fcgi and see the following screen:

On Linux the iipserver is not very common. You will have to download it and follow their compile and installation instructions.

Configuring Talia for Iip

If you followed the TaliaInstallation instructions and used the configure_talia script, it will ask you the following question:

Do you want to use the IIP image server? (yn)

If you answer "y" here, several things will happen. The first is that the script will add some lines to the config/environment/initializers/talia.rb script that will make Talia automatically create IIP pyramid files for each image that is imported.

It will then ask you some additional questions to configure Talia to use the IIP server:

Enter the URL of your IIP server, or the port number (for default URL on localhost):

Here you have to enter the address of your IIP server (that is the URL where you find the IIP home page show above). Note that for a public site, a localhost entry will not work. The URL must be accessible by each browser that accesses the site.

Enter the path to store the IIP image files (return for default):

Enter the path name where you want to store the IIP pyramid files. If you want to deploy your site on a Java application server, this should be an absolute path.

Enter the path to the vips command (default: "/usr/bin/vips"):
Enter the path to the convert command (default: "/usr/bin/convert"):

These are the path names to the vips command and the convert command from ImageMagick. These are absolutely required for anything to work. If you've already installed those programs, and you are on a Unix-like system, it should automatically suggest the correct location which you can accept by hitting "return".

Iip Image Viewer

To use the Iip on your side, you will need a "viewer" component on your web site. For Talia the easiest way is to install the muruca_widgets gem (if you haven't) already:

gem install muruca_widgets

This will give you a number of generators that will create the necessary code to embed a viewer in your site. All you will have to do is to call one or two helpers and pass Talia's IipData? object to the viewer. See the muruca_widget documentation for more information.