HDR IIIF for everyone…

…will be offered by the next version of VIPS. John Cupitt has now added the functionality. This means that you no longer need your own image tiler for HDR.

If you want to try it out now, you’ll need to build the current development version yourself from the Git repository.

libultrahdr, a C compiler and meson must be installed. On MacOS with brew: brew install meson libultrahdr

If you need support for more image formats, this file provides an overview of the available options. Libraries that are already installed are usually found automatically; otherwise, additional libraries must be installed.

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/libvips/libvips.git
cd libvips
meson setup build --prefix /usr/local -Duhdr=enabled
cd build
meson compile
meson test
sudo meson install

Then you can create IIIF pyramids for HTML with the following command:

vips dzsave $IMAGE_FILE $TARGET_DIR --keep gainmap --tile-size=512 --layout iiif

However, there is currently still a metadata entry missing in the info.json file to indicate that it is an HDR image. And the major viewers do not yet support the display either, more in the old post.

With the upcoming version (8.18.0 - which should be released in one to two months), the functionality will then also be available via package managers…