Hosting gigapixel images

Sirv can serve giant gigapixel images as much as 50,000px by 50,000px.

This image of The Last Supper painting is 25,000px by 9,499px:

Use Sirv for your gigapixel images

It's easy to host and serve your big images from Sirv.

1. Upload your images to your Sirv account. If you don't have an account yet, create a free account now.

2. Right-click your image and copy it's URL.

3. Paste the URL into this configuration wizard.

4. Choose your Zoom settings, including the deep zoom mode, then copy and paste the code into your web page.

Highly configurable zooms

As well as deep zoom on click, you can choose hover zoom or magnify zoom. Many other popular options exist - learn more in the documentation for Sirv image zoom viewer.

The following demo shows a watch image of 11,492px by 8,621px. It has been configured to open fullscreen on click and show a contextual map in the corner while zoomed:

File size limit

Sirv is extremely fast at optimizing and serving files on-the-fly. Like magic, your master image can be instantly requested in limitless sizes and styles.

To keep Sirv fast, some limitations are placed on the size of gigapixel zoom images.

Limits on your master images:

• 128 MB maximum file size
• 33.55 MB maximum file size of pre-processed image (see below)
• 50,000px maximum width/height

Limits on served images:

• 50,000px maximum width/height if JPEG
• 16,383px maximum width/height if PNG or WebP

Image preparation advice

If your images are really huge - beyond 10,000px - we recommend applying some compression to your images before you upload them.

Top tips:

• JPEG format is usually the fastest to process
• Apply 85% JPEG compression - a subtle compression yet large file size reduction
• Try using a better image compression program e.g. Caesium (free for Windows and Mac)
• Try reducing the image dimensions slightly

Automatic pre-processing

Upon upload, if your image is between 16 MB and 128 MB, Sirv will create a pre-processed version behind the scenes. This pre-processed image helps ensure that future versions of the image will be generated really quickly. However, if the pre-processed version exceeds 33.55 MB, it won't be usable. Read on for solutions...

Troubleshooting

If your file won't serve, visit the image URL directly to see what error is returned.

Possible errors:

• 415 - Image is too large
  This means the image exceeds the 65,534px width/height limit. Try resizing it to 50,000px and uploading it again.
• 415 - This xx.xx MB image exceeds the 33.55 MB processing and 128 MB pre-processing limits.
  Try applying some more compression to the image before you upload it.
• The image "https://example.sirv.com/example.jpg" cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
  Processing this image took too long. It will probably process successfully later. It usually only happens when serving an extremely large entire image - use zoomable images instead.

Ask an expert

If you have questions about hosting gigapixel images, contact a Sirv expert from your Sirv account. If you don't have a Sirv account yet, create an account now or contact us from our general enquiries form.