Question

What are EasyZoom (SZI) images?

Answer

EasyZoom is a product of Smart in Media. The SZI file is a single-file storage format container for Whole Slide Images. The EasyZoom image file contains every layer of a Deep Zoom image pyramid along with all of the supporting XML and thumbnail images.

Whole slide images can get quite large (20+ GigaBytes) and can include over 100,000 individual image files. Due to the size and number of files, copying or moving them can take a very long time.

The primary advantage of the SZI file format is that copy time is significantly reduced since only a single, large file (and not thousands of small files) must be managed.