abilities to scale to hundreds of thousands of images, to multiple CPUs or load-balanced server machines, and to the quantity and quality of their image processing functionalities, such as resizing, compositing, zoom and 3D viewers, and the addition of dynamic data to the images in the form of overlaid text or graphics. Dynamic compositing is also extremely useful for merchants who permit product customization. Many vehicle manufacturers use dynamic compositing to let the visitor visualize their customizations. Large image sets, mapping, and geospatial use Geospatial or mapping has particular need for specialized "image servers". Aerial and satellite images are georeferenced and can be hundreds or thousands of gigabytes in size. Traditional mechanisms for serving this data have proved inadequate. The first specialized image server for geospatial image data was Image Web Server, released in 1999. Image Web Server, among other protocols, supports ECWP (ERDAS Compressed Wavelet Protocol) that "streams" large images to a user's application, rather than sending a regular image over HTTP. The well known standard for a distributed architecture of geospatial data is Web Map Service. Responsive web design & mobile support Responsive web design has driven the creation of dozens of new image servers which often integrate device or resolution detection. To prevent resampling artifacts, it's important that images display at native resolution - one image pixel per device display pixel. To accomplish this, a large number of variations must be created for each screen resolution. An image server can solve that by dynamically adjusting the size of the image according to the user's browser settings. Backwards compatibility Old versions of Internet Explorer have trouble displaying PNG and MNG images, but an image server could detect the user's browser version and send the image in a supported format such as GIF instead. Image servers may enable early adopters to begin using WebP before all browsers implement support. Standards and specifications RESTful Image API (RIAPI) - 2012 - Draft specification for a simple, declarative, querystring-based image API. Browser-compatible. Internet Imaging Protocol (IIP) - 1997 - (optionally) HTTP-based imperative protocol for image editing; heavily tied to the FlashPix file format. Authored by the International Imaging Industry Association ECWP (ERDAS Compressed Wavelet Protocol) Web Map Service See also Dynamic imaging References Web hosting