Thanks for all the recommendations!

I've been reading and understanding the problem space better.  Here's my summary of what I've figured out. 

For this project, there is really only a handful of big images, and simplicity of server-side is a priority -- so I think it's actually okay to pre-render all the tiles in advance, and avoid an actual image server -- to the extent tools can work with this. 

At first, I thought "Oh gee, this is actually kind of like a mapping problem", and wound up at OpenLayers. I think OpenLayers could be used for this non-geographical purpose -- with "units: pixels" -- but it's definitely a complicated product (without particularly extensive documentation), and beyond feeling pretty confident that it would be possible to use it like this, I hadn't actually managed to arrive at a demo. 

Then I eventually found OpenSeadragon, which a couple other people in this thread suggested, which looks like a pretty good fit. It looks like it possibly can work with entirely pre-rendered tiles served statically with no image server, using the "DZI" format. (http://openseadragon.github.io/examples/tilesource-dzi/).  I haven't actually gotten to a proof of concept here, but I think it'll work. 

I didn't mention that the next phase requirement/desire was annotations on the image. It looks like there's a tool called Annotorious which has some (beta) support for annotations in both OpenSeadragon and OpenLayers. 

So my current plan is trying to pursue a proof of concept using OpenSeadragon and Annotorious. There are some potential future phase requirements which might require multiple layers, which I guess might require trying OpenLayers after all. (My sense is that Annotorious' OpenLayers support is currently a lot buggier than the OpenSeadragon support though). 

Thanks again for the suggestions! Very helpful. I may be back with more questions. 

Jonathan 
________________________________________
From: Code for Libraries [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Esmé Cowles [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Friday, July 25, 2014 4:44 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] very large image display?

We previously used the Zoomify Flash applet, but now use Leaflet.js with the Zoomify tileset plugin:

https://github.com/turban/Leaflet.Zoomify

One thing I like about this approach is that it minimizes the amount of Javascript code the clients have to load, since we use Leaflet.js for our maps and it's already loaded.

-Esme

>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Jonathan Rochkind
>> Sent: Friday, July 25, 2014 10:36 AM
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: [CODE4LIB] very large image display?
>>
>> Does anyone have a good solution to recommend for display of very large images on the web?  I'm thinking of something that supports pan and scan, as well as loading only certain tiles for the current view to avoid loading an entire giant image.
>>
>> A URL to more info to learn about things would be another way of answering this question, especially if it involves special server-side software.  I'm not sure where to begin. Googling around I can't find any clearly good solutions.
>>
>> Has anyone done this before and been happy with a solution?
>>
>> Thanks for any info!
>>
>> Jonathan