Downloading high-resolution tiled imagery from museum websites
I’ve always admired Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Atlanticus for its elaborate and sometimes whimsical drawings of machines, so when I went to locate high-resolution copies at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana website, I was surprised to find no simple download link. Instead, the site used a library called openseadragon.js
to serve tiles of the image as needed and at the required resolution. Right-clicking save as
on the image basically works, but zooming out to view the whole image results in lower-resolution tiles being used for stitching.
Enter dezoomify-extension. When a tiled image is present on a webpage, it detects it and sends the user to dezoomify.ophir.dev to download it in the highest resolution available.
Now I can get back to laying out those Codex Atlanticus placemats I was making for my kitchen table!