Gain richer access to the world's image and audio/visual files

Break down silos with open APIs

Many of the images and audio/visual resources that are fundamental to research exist in silos, with access restricted to locally-built applications. IIIF gives you and your audience freedom to work across barriers.

The Wellcome Collection uses IIIF to make medical and scientific materials available via the custom-built Wellcome Viewer, and to offer multiple image download sizes to users.

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The Rijksmuseum features rich online exhibitions driven by IIIF annotations.

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The SAT Daizokyo Database Project includes individual mandalas with over 400 IIIF annotations, using Mirador.

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McGill University's Distributed Digital Music Archives & Libraries Lab uses the Presentation API to integrate audio and moving images.

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Simplify and enhance your work

Great for researchers

Examine, compare, annotate, and share. IIIF enables easy use across repositories, with tools to aid research and presentation.

Efficient for developers

Publish once, reuse often. IIIF serves high-quality digital objects to your own site and others in many formats, without vendor lock-in.

Practical for leaders

Share your collections as widely as possible. IIIF is a cost-effective way to serve billions of digital objects with open-source, community-driven ethics.

Why IIIF

Start building

The six IIIF APIs fit together to deliver endless possibilities.

Image API

Retrieves images from anywhere in the world and allows the user to select an area of the image and to resize, rotate, and edit the quality.

Presentation API

Packages each image with its metadata so users know the origin, title of the image, and even what page of a book the image was from.

Authentication API

Control and restrict access by creating a link to a user interface for logging in and services that provide credentials.

Content Search API

Perform search for text within or annotations related to digital objects.

Change Discovery API

Harvest any changes published by organizations that deliver digital objects.

Content State API

Generate a very specific link to a particular view of an object, like a specific area on a particular page rotated at a certain angle.

Funded by global technology leaders

IIIF is funded by a 63-member global consortium, and leveraged by aggregators, research institutions, national libraries, archives, museums, software companies, and digital agencies around the world. Consortium members include:

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