Zoom it by Microsoft
Microsoft Zoom it
Zoom it is a new free web based service from Microsoft that enables you to enter the URL of any image and dynamically create a fully functional zoomed image display which is embeddable, can be used for the viewing of enhanced images and provides the ability to share your high resolution images with a unique shortened URL.
Zoom.it converts your image to the Deep Zoom format. The file format used by Deep Zoom source files is XML based, which enables you to smoothly and effectively explore the whole image, regardless of the image size. Single large images in Deep Zoom are represented by a tiled image pyramid. This allows the Deep Zoom rendering engine to grab only the piece of data that is necessary for a particular view of an image. If an image is viewed zoomed out very far, then only a small thumbnail is needed to show the image on screen. However, if the user is zoomed in to a specific area of a large image, then only those tiles needed to show the specific areas are downloaded. This can lead to very large bandwidth savings because often only some aspects of a large image are interesting to the user. It also provides great responsiveness and functionality when working with large images.
Zoom.it runs on Windows Azure and enhances the experience with Microsoft Silverlight when available.
Zoom.it also has an Application Programming Interface (API), which enables web programmers access to Zoom.it functionality, that offers both RESTful and non-RESTful behavior and supports both XML and JSON. The API exposes the underlying Deep Zoom Image and surrounding metadata, which you can use to power your own applications and experiences.
Zoom.it was created by Microsoft Live Labs, by the same people that developed Photosynth and Pivot.
Ready to create your own zoomed image display? Check it out at :zoom.it