hometown 4.5.18+hometown-1.2.1A collector of things worth knowing and things not worth knowing. Freelance software developer. Web/UI/Maps/Visualization/Image Annotation/Open Source. https://rainersimon.io
I can finally share the happy news: liiive.now – my tool for real-time collaborative annotation of #IIIF images – is going open source!
First code is online here:
https://github.com/rsimon/liiive
A full self-hosting setup will be available by the end of February.
Huge thanks to the University of Graz Department of Digital Humanities and the DHInfra.at initiative for their support!
It is done! 🚀 Today I’m publishing the first full, formal open source release of liiive — my web-based, real-time collaborative annotation environment for #IIIF image collections.
liiive enables users to view and annotate IIIF images together in real time — with shared cursors, synchronized drawing tools, and exportable, standards-compatible annotations.
As of today, the repository contains everything you need to run your own fully self-hosted instance:
https://github.com/rsimon/liiive
A big thank you to the University of Graz Department of Digital Humanities and the DHInfra.at initiative — this release wouldn’t have been possible without their support.
And now? it’s up to you!
Clone the repo. Deploy your own instance. Start annotating.
Most importantly: tell us how it goes. If something breaks, open an issue on GitHub. If something feels unclear, confusing, or slow — we want to know. Your feedback will shape where liiive goes next.
Need to publish images as #IIIF — but have only 30 SECONDS to do it?
tiny.iiif to the rescue! 🫨
Meet my new open source side project:
• Drag & drop images → instant IIIF Image Service powered by Cantaloupe
• Create a folder → drag images in → boom: instant presentation manifest!
All work in progress, but already a lot of fun. Ping me if you want to know more!
Working with a small museum, local archive, or research project that has digitized images but little metadata?
I’m looking for small collections interested in testing a VLM-based image-enrichment pipeline we’ve been assembling (transcription incl. some handwritten, captions, summaries, entity extraction, IIIF).
If you can share 20–50 JPEG or IIIF images plus a short note on what you’d like to improve, I’ll run them through the pipeline and share a private preview. Happy to discuss what works and what doesn’t.
Comment or DM if interested.