Frequently Asked Questions

• How can I...

  Be sure to check the documentation and tutorials for an answer to your specific question, as they cover most of Micrio's possibilities.

• What browsers does the viewer work on?

  The Micrio client viewer fully works on all current mobile and desktop browsers, including:

  • Mozilla Firefox
  • Apple Safari
  • Google Chrome
  • MS Internet Explorer 11 *
  • MS Edge
  • Google Chromium and Chromium based browsers (Brave, Samsung Internet)

  * If your image isn't 360 degrees and doesn't have any embedded audio, it will still even work in Internet Explorer 10.

• I have a 4GB TIFF image file. This is certainly too large to upload?

  That's not a problem. Behind the scenes, Micrio processes all your uploaded original images, cutting it up to a lot of very small parts, and saving them in a web-compatible image format such as JPG.

  This means that every time someone views your image, only the specific image parts based on the user's screen size and zoom level are downloaded! Your original file will never be downloaded by the viewer.

• How is Micrio different from [high-res web image viewer]?

  There are quite a few web libraries available that allow you to view and zoom through ultra resolution images, and support markers, tours, etc. Micrio is one of them, however created totally from scratch, having its own performance optimized algorithms and unique features such as positional audio and music.

  However, what sets Micrio apart the most:

  • It's a full service: not only is it an image viewer, it's also a full server environment that processes your original ultra resolution images (up to 10GP out of the box), provides globally optimized CDN-fronted hosting, has an online editor to enrich the images with markers, tours and audio, and much more.
  • You don't have to be a developer to use it. The Micrio editor is well documented and user friendly, allowing non-developers to create and share or embed their own interactive experiences easily.

  So not only is it a solution for viewing ultra resolution images, it also saves you the headaches of processing, annotating and hosting them.

• Does Micrio support the IIIF framework?

  Yes! Full Image API support, both as client and as image server! Check our IIIF page for more details.

• Can visitors of Micrio projects create their own markers?

  Not at this moment. Having visitor-added content adds the necessity of a moderation step to prevent unwanted added content like spam or inappropriate messages. While it's of course possible as a custom project (contact us for inquiries), it won't be a default Micrio feature in the near future.

• Is Micrio open source?

  No. Or at least not yet.

  To make Micrio fully open source would not only make it more time consuming for us to maintain the codebase (read "My condolences, you're now the maintainer of a popular open source project", or Wolfram Tech's recent blogpost Why Wolfram Tech Isn't Open Source-- A Dozen Reasons), it would also diffuse the distribution since everyone could set up their own server environment.

  However, we are considering making the client library open source. Once we decide about this, we will add this to our roadmap (as of writing August 2018).

• Does Micrio work on touch screens?

  Yes, no problem with a single user.

• Can I run a Micrio image without an internet connection?

  If you have a stand or installation somewhere without a stable internet connection, it's possible to get all your image data to run offline. Please contact us for more info.

• What's under the hood, technically?

  The Micrio viewer client is made in vanilla ES6 Javascript, using many latest technical features, such as:

  • WebAssembly and WebGL for high performance rendering
  • Custom Elements using Shadow DOM for good <micr-io> tag integration
  • WebVR/XR for 360° content in VR

  See this Q42 engineering blogpost for the journey of migrating the Micrio client to WebGL and WebAssembly.

  For browsers with these features not available, automatic fallbacks are in place. Even MS Internet Explorer 10 still runs Micrio.

  The Micrio server is setup like this:

  • Written in .NET Core 3.2 (C#)
  • Hosted in Google Cloud
  • Separate image processing servers are running in a scalable linux cluster
  • Image and asset hosting in Google CDN-fronted storage for quick global delivery (with optional S3 / Azure options)
  • The dashboard is made in VueJS