International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF)
IIIF is a set of open standards for delivering high-quality, attributed digital objects online at scale.
What is IIIF and who is it for?
The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) is a set of technology standards intended to make it easier for researchers, students and the public at large to view, manipulate, compare and annotate digital images on the web. IIIF is a community and open-source initiative, meaning that it relies on the contributions of multiple entities in order to operate, but retains staff for training and other purposes. This page focuses on Stanford University’s implementation of IIIF and our involvement.
IIIF is oriented towards several communities: researchers who want to compare and annotate detailed images side-by-side, developers who want to display high-quality digital objects without vendor lock-in, and cultural institutions who want to share their image collections as widely as possible.
IIIF (generally pronounced “triple-eye-eff”) has been adopted, or is in the process of being adopted, by many of the world's great cultural institutions who have been systematically digitizing their collections for years. Learn more about the IIIF community.
In general terms, the goal of IIIF is to make it simple in cases where you find compatible images to open them in the web platform of your choice, easily manipulate them, analyze them, and compare them to images from other institutions.
When you see the IIIF logo in a search result or record for an image, you know that it is available to use with IIIF-compatible viewers.
This video (no audio) demonstrates a IIIF viewer called Mirador, and what a user may do when encountering a IIIF logo near a Stanford digital object. The user can execute a drag-and-drop gesture on the IIIF logo to analyze the IIIF-enabled image or media in a IIIF viewer.
What to expect?
Get started with these tutorials from IIIF to learn more.
What is a IIIF viewer?
Digital libraries, museums, and online archives provide interactive image viewing experiences via image viewers on their websites. These viewers allow users to zoom, pan, and manipulate high-resolution images, as well as navigate complex objects like scanned books. While traditional viewers were limited to a single institution's images, IIIF viewers adhere to the IIIF open standard, enabling them to display images from any institution supporting the standard. For example, a IIIF viewer on a Stanford website can display images not only from Stanford but also from repositories like the Digital Bodleian, expanding access across institutions.
What are the different IIIF viewers?
There are a growing number of viewers that are capable of rendering IIIF-compatible images. See a list of viewers and demos.
Mirador is an open-source IIIF viewer that was initially developed at Stanford and is now used by many cultural heritage institutions to showcase their holdings. The project is maintained and developed in collaboration with Harvard, the National Gallery of Art, and several other institutions from around the world. Mirador is unique in that it allows the user to open multiple images in the same workspace to compare side-by-side and even draw annotations to highlight and describe regions of the image. Try Mirador here.
How do I view an image in a IIIF viewer?
Play the video above to learn how to drag and drop the IIIF icon into Mirador, and then compare it to an image from, for instance, the Digital Bodleian using the same drag and drop gesture.
Questions or want to join the IIIF community?
Join the IIIF listserv or Slack channel.