Seadragon review

Check out our review of Seadragon, a free app that lets you zoom in and see tiny details of vast gigapixel images on your iPhone

Published on Sep 4, 2009

Seeing patterns of objects within photos used to mean that you’d been smoking something you shouldn’t strictly have smoked, but these days it just means that you’re looking at a gigapixel image.

These images are hugely detailed images – or in some cases artworks – that are generally like an expansive collage of images, designed to, say, give you a multitude of different views around a city, or a more arty piece that looks like a single image until you zoom right into it and find that your view of a New York skyline was actually constructed of toilet rolls. Seadragon is merely a framework from within which you can check out these massive images.

In this respect, Seadragon is a huge success. You can zoom in and out and swipe across these images fluidly, with no real noticeable slowdown. Of course, unless you wait for the actual image data so stream over the web, you’ll largely be scrolling and zooming around a blurry mass rather than an ultra-detailed image, but that’s up to your connection rather than the Seadragon app.

The sheer speed at which you can navigate around these massively complicated images is very impressive, both from a user-experience point of view and from a pure technical perspective.

Of course, once you get beyond the wonder of the gigapixel image, what you’ve actually got to look at becomes all the more important. Seadragon comes with links to a number of very interesting images, including satellite imagery of the whole world – think Google Maps – surface imagery of the Moon and Mars and a rather nifty set of pictures from an Asian vacation taken by Johnathan Dughi.

It also comes linked in as standard to the Photosynth library, another Microsoft service that lets you upload whole libraries of images to the net. The problem with browsing this is that it’s full of shots of peoples’ houses rather than anything all that interesting. We’re sure there’s gigapixel gold in there, but trawling through it can prove disheartening when you’ve only got a user-made title and tiny thumbnail to go on to start with and thousands of the things to sift through in the full library. Surely it could do with a ‘top picks’ list?

This slight lack of user friendliness continues when you try to move out further into web content available elsewhere too. While you can add your own Deep Zoom Content links and even RSS feeds, you have to actually know what to add – Seadragon doesn’t point you in the right direction at all.

So, once your Gigapixel greed expands beyond the fantastic images linked directly from within the app, you’ll need to do a bit of research. However, there’s no denying that Seadragon is a great piece of software. It may not be terribly useful, but it is fascinating.