How do photographers and artists share ultra-high-resolution work online today?

While building Digital Original and Digital Original XR, we ran into an interesting challenge:

How do you display ultra-high-resolution artwork, photography, and video without forcing visitors to download massive files?

Most websites solve this by heavily compressing images. The result is faster loading, but a lot of detail gets lost.

Our approach is different.

On the web, we process high-resolution and ultra-high-resolution images into image tiles, similar to how Google Maps works. Instead of loading an entire file at once, visitors only load the parts they are currently viewing. This makes it possible to explore large artworks and photographs in much greater detail.

We’re also bringing similar ideas into XR with Digital Original XR for Meta Quest, where visitors can experience high-resolution artworks and photography in immersive virtual gallery spaces.

I’m curious how others approach this problem.

• How do you currently share high-resolution photography or artwork online?

• Have you used Deep Zoom technology before?

• Do viewers actually care about seeing every detail, or is this mainly important to creators?

Would love to hear how artists, photographers, and developers are solving this today.