Image server



         


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An image server is a type of web server software that is specialized in delivering images. They are used as a compliment to existing web servers such as Apache to speed up image retrival.

Many image servers also feature complimentary image processing functions that are useful when serving images such as alpha blending, compositing source images, rotating, color adjustment etc. One problem that plague web masters is that for their site to be compatible with as many browsers as possible, they have to use very general images to fit all. An image with a width of 400 pixels will take up half of the screen in a 800x600 resolution, but in a 1200x1024 resolution it will only cover a third. Therefore, if the page is designed for 800x600 resolution it will look considerably worse in 1200x1024. An image server can solve that by dynamically adjusting the size of the image according to the users browser settings. Similarily, old versions of Internet Explorer has trouble displaying PNG and MNG images, but an image server could detect the users browser version and send the image in a supported format such as GIF instead.

Image servers can also be applied to limit bandwidth usage for the navigation of very large image sets, for the management of various images sizes and regions from a single source, and for interactive streaming.

In e-commerce, Image servers are qualified by their abilities to scale to hundreds of thousands of images, to multiple CPUs or load-balanced server machines, and to the quantity and quality of their image processing functionalities. Open APIs and standardized client applications add to the value of an Image Server.

A well-known imaging protocol implemented on top of HTTP is know as the Internet Imaging Protocol (IIP). This protocol is promlugated by the International Imaging Industry Association. Implementors of some or all of this imaging standard include True Spectra, iseemedia, and Sun's Java Advanced Imaging Group.

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