I’ve been experimenting with IIPImage and its companion IIPMooViewer as a way of serving higher resolution images in a web browser — think “Google Maps slippy map, but for images.” (the cool Java kids would use djatoka for this, but Java makes my head hurt).

I grabbed this 1958 aerial photo from the government collection of photos of Charlottetown and turned it into a Tiled Pyramidal TIFF with ImageMagick:

convert 16113-44.jpg \
  -define tiff:tile-geometry=256x256 \
  -compress jpeg 'ptif:charlottetown.tif'

And then set it up to be served from IIPMooViewer here. The result is imperfect: the image viewer appears to “stall” after loading an initial collection of tiles (it completes eventually). It would have been nice to have access to higher-resolution scans of the aerial photos to be able to dig deeper, but it’s still an interesting window into Charlottetown in the late 1950s.