OctopusViewer user manual

OctopusViewer gathers all your Omeka S media in a lightweight viewer. It’s intended to be used as a replacement of other viewers like UniversalViewer or Mirador.

However, unlike UniversalViewer and Mirador, OctopusViewer is not a IIIF viewer. In order to use IIIF manifests with OctopusViewer, they should be added to Omeka S as “IIIF presentation” media (requires Omeka S 4.0.0 or higher).

Motivation

UniversalViewer and Mirador are great tools but they come with some limitations when using them in Omeka S:

• They require a IIIF Presentation manifest, which often means an additional module should be installed

• They support only a subset of Omeka S media types

• They are not easy to customize in Omeka S themes

The goals of OctopusViewer are:

• it should be able to display all types of media, falling back to a sensible default when a media cannot be rendered in a browser

• it should use as few external dependencies as possible, favoring the tools that are already available on an empty Omeka S installation (like OpenSeadragon)

• it should require no additional Omeka S modules, but should be extensible by them

• it should be easily customizable in Omeka S themes

Features

• A viewer split into 3 panels:

  • the left panel contains a media selector

  • the center panel renders the media

  • the right panel displays metadata for the currently selected media

• Images are displayed within OpenSeadragon, allowing to zoom, rotate, and flip images

• An optional IIIF Image server can be used

• PDF files are displayed with pdfjs.

• Fullscreen mode

Installation

See general end user documentation for installing a module.

License

OctopusViewer is distributed under the GNU General Public License, version 3. The full text of this license is given in the LICENSE file.