OME-Zarr Portal

Drop an OME-Zarr image, or a folder of them, to explore in the browser.

Data is not uploaded to remote servers and stays on the local machine.

Visualize

Open in Neuroglancer

Drop one OME-Zarr image to view it, or a folder of images to load each one as its own layer.

About this portal

What is OME-Zarr?

A community format for bioimages. One image is a folder, not a single file: the pixels are cut into chunks, and a small metadata file beside them records the axes, the physical pixel size and the channels. 

sample.ome.zarr/
├─ zarr.json   the metadata
├─ 0/          full resolution
├─ 1/          half size
└─ 2/          quarter size

The same folder holds the image at several resolutions, so a viewer reads only the level and the region it is showing. That is why a 200 GB image opens as quickly as a small one.

What can I drop?

Single files such as .tif or .czi cannot be opened, and neither can a bare Zarr array with no multiscales metadata — convert those first.

Which browsers work?

Chrome, Edge, Opera, Brave and other Chromium-based browsers.

Nothing is uploaded, so the page has to read the dropped folder where it already sits — which needs the File System Access API — and then serve it to Neuroglancer and Zarrcade through a Service Worker. Firefox and Safari give a page only a private storage area of its own, never a folder on your disk, so there is nothing for the portal to open there.

Where to go next