Last modified: 2014-06-10 11:53:19 UTC
With projects such as Wikisource, and activities such as the German chapter's digitizing of old manuscripts, we're going to get an increased number of very large images (high-resolution scans of whole pages). Currently, such images are shown as thumbnails in the image description size, and if one wants to see details, one has to load the whole image into the browser. This is not very user-friendly, especially for people with slow connections. I suggest we do a multi-resolution image viewer like the one on http://gallica.bnf.fr It allows the user to navigate inside the image at different resolutions, only loading the parts that are actually needed.
A lot of this functionality is now available in http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ProofreadPage A lot of it is implemented in JavaScript, so it might be possible to demo it on Commons. Ideally this should be rolled into core.
