Slidescape is a whole-slide image viewer for digital pathology.
The latest binaries can be downloaded on GitHub from the releases section for Windows, Linux and macOS.
The viewer has built-in support for:
- Tiled TIFF and BigTIFF (including generic and Philips TIFF variants).
- Philips iSyntax.
- Simple images (JPEG, PNG).
- DICOM.
Slidescape can also detect and load the OpenSlide library at runtime. If OpenSlide is present, the Aperio, Hamamatsu, Leica, MIRAX, Sakura, Trestle, and Ventana formats can additionally be loaded.
To enable OpenSlide support on Windows, download (or compile) the 64-bit binaries
and put all of the DLL files together in an openslide/ folder, and put that folder in the same location as slidescape.exe.
To enable OpenSlide support on Linux, install the openslide library, either using a package manager or
by building and installing it manually. The program will try to locate libopenslide.so, either in the
default system library paths or in /usr/local/lib/.
To enable OpenSlide support on macOS, install the openslide library using Homebrew or MacPorts.
The program will try to locate libopenslide.dylib in the default install path: either /usr/local/opt/openslide/lib/ for
Homebrew, or /opt/local/lib/ for MacPorts.
To navigate an image, you can pan and zoom using either the mouse or the keyboard.
The mouse and keyboard sensitivity can be adjusted in the general options,
Edit > General options... under the tab Controls.
Basic image filters are available under View > Image options.
These allow adjusting the black and white level and filtering out a background color.
There is experimental support for loading a second image as an overlay (e.g. a mask image).
To load an image as an overlay, press F6 before loading the second image.
Slidescape can create and edit annotations in XML format, compatible with ASAP.
Annotations can be manipulated in a variety of ways:
- New annotations can be created (points
Q, linesM, rectanglesR, freeformsF). - Individual coordinates can be moved, inserted or deleted (to toggle editing of coordinates, press
E). - Annotations can be assigned a (color-coded) group.
- Annotations can be split into parts.
Changes to annotations are autosaved by default (a backup of the original unchanged XML file will be preserved with file extension .orig).
Slidescape has capabilities for converting, cropping and resizing WSIs. The output will be a new pyramidal TIFF file.
To crop an image, you can specify a region of interest (ROI) by right-clicking a previously created annotation and selecting Export region....
Alternatively, you can specify the region to export using the menu (Edit > Select export region), then use File > Export > Export... to export the file.
Resizing the WSI to a different resolution is also possible.
Image export operations can also be performed using a command-line interface.
The basic command for export operations is:
slidescape <input files> --export
You can specify a number of additional command-line flags:
--mpp <micrometers per pixel>
Specifies the desired output resolution. If not specified, the resolution of the input file will be matched (=default). If the output and input resolutions do not match, the WSI will be resampled to the new resolution. For resampling, the lanczos3 method is used (this similar to how e.g. the Python PIL library does this).
--quality <JPEG quality value>
Sets the output JPEG quality setting. Should be a value between 1 and 100. Choosing a higher JPEG compression quality can decrease image quality loss from recompression, at the cost of a higher file size. Typically used values are 80 or 90 (default: 90).
--tile-size <tile size in pixels>
Sets the tile size in pixels (default: 512).
--postfix <file name postfix>
Specifies the text to append to the input filename for the output file, before the final .tiff file extension (default: ".exported").
Example: an input filename of 1.isyntax with a postfix of ".exported" will generate an output filename of 1.exported.tiff.
--roi <name of annotation>
Specifies the name of the region of interest (ROI) annotation in the associated XML file. The region to export will be set to a rectangle-shaped area bounded/encompassed by the specified annotation's coordinates. An XML annotation file with the same name as the input WSI file is required to be present.
Example: slidescape 1.mrxs 2.mrxs --export --roi "Annotation 0"
--first-roi
Specifies that the first annotation present in the associated XML file should be used as the region of interest (ROI). The region to export will be set to a rectangle-shaped area bounded/encompassed by the annotation's coordinates. An XML annotation file with the same name as the input WSI file is required to be present.
Example: slidescape 1.mrxs 2.mrxs --export --first-roi
--with-annotations
Enables saving of annotations within the region of interest (ROI), as specified by the --roi or --first-roi flags.
If there any annotations are visible within the ROI, a new XML file will be created for the output WSI containing those annotations.
Note that on Windows, the separate build slidescape_console.exe should be used instead of the regular slidescape.exe,
in order to make console output visible. See README_console.txt for more information.
You can build the program using CMake and the MinGW-w64 toolchain.
All library code is included with the source code distribution (there are no other external dependencies).
You may wish to install nasm so that the SIMD-optimized assembly code in libjpeg-turbo can be compiled.
Make sure the build tools cmake and (optionally) nasm are installed.
The following libraries are required to be installed: SDL2 (on Linux and macOS), GLEW (Linux only).
mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
cd ..
cmake --build build --target slidescape -- -j
./slidescape
Author: Pieter Valkema.
Slidescape embeds code from the following projects, under their respective licenses:
- Dear ImGui (graphical interface library)
- FreeType (font renderer)
- libjpeg-turbo (JPEG image codec)
- Mbed TLS (SSL/TLS and cryptography library)
- Yxml (XML parser)
- json.h (JSON parser)
- linmath.h (linear math library)
- stb_image.h (image loader)
- OpenJPEG (discrete wavelet transform)
- LZ4 (compression algorithm)
- base64.c (base64 decoder)
- cityhash (byte swap operations)
- stb_ds.h (typesafe dynamic array and hash tables for C)
- ltalloc (fast memory allocator)
- glad (OpenGL loader)
- Keycode (library for platform-independent keyboard input handling)
- ImGuiFileDialog (file dialog for dear ImGui)
- libtiff (LZW decoder from libtiff)
- minfft (Fast Fourier Transform library)
- HTTP parser (HTTP parser)
- Pillow (image resampling)
Uses SDL2 and GLEW on Linux/macOS.
The application icon was made by Freepik from Flaticon.
Copyright (C) 2019-2025 Pieter Valkema.
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
See LICENSE.txt for more information.