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🚨Upcoming OME-Zarr Office Hours!🚨 TODAY Oct 1 9am Paris / 4pm Tokyo / 5pm Melbourne. Come ask questions, or lurk as @kevinyamauchi.bsky.social, Draga Doncila Pop, @joshmoore.bsky.social, and @jni.codes discuss ome-zarr-models-py and RFC-8. ngff.openmicroscopy.org/community/#o...

ngff.openmicroscopy.org

Community — NGFF documentation

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Josh Moore @joshmoore.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

ICYMI: OME-Zarr 0.6 is out! 🎉 This is big, years in the making. @bogovicj.bsky.social & @jo-soltwedel.bsky.social perseverance brought transformations into this next major step on the road to OME-Zarr 1.0. 👏👏👏 Huge congratulations to the Johns — and to everyone who helped get us here! 🥳🙌

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Image Cooperative @image.coop · 25/09/2026

RFC-4 (anatomical) orientation markers in @napari.org are coming along! 🥳 You can read more about what this means and why it's important at: ngff.openmicroscopy.org/rfc/4/index....

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Rakhi @atbrakhi.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

What happens when browsers agree with each other, but disagree with the specification? A few days ago, my colleague @bkardell.com pointed out that this sometimes happens! You might expect us to fix the browsers. But sometimes, we change the specification instead. www.atbrakhi.dev/blog/browser...

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Philip Jägenstedt @foolip.org · 23/09/2026

This is the best explanation of the interplay of specs, tests, and implementations that I've read. The point of both specs and tests is interoperable implementations, but that doesn't mean that implementations are always right when they agree.

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Image Cooperative @image.coop · 24/09/2026

New blog post from @joshmoore.bsky.social : how we communicate about project stages and what kind of feedback we are seeking at any given time, and avoid "stop the presses!" moments when something is close to the finish line: image.coop/blog/posts/2...

image.coop

Opportunity windows – Image Cooperative

Making room for feedback without stopping the work

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Image Cooperative @image.coop · 24/09/2026

New week, new OME-Zarr Office Hours! Thu 4pm San Francisco / Fri 8am Tokyo / Fri 9am Melbourne. Come ask any and all questions about OME-Zarr, *or* just lurk while @jni.codes and Draga Doncila Pop keep working on adding RFC4 orientation markers to @napari.org! ngff.openmicroscopy.org/community/in...

ngff.openmicroscopy.org

Community — NGFF documentation

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Juan Nunez-Iglesias @jni.codes · 22/09/2026

Igalia turns 25! Read about their journey in the quoted thread+blog. Igalia is the cooperative that inspired @image.coop. I was lucky to visit them in A Coruña a few months ago and they continue to inspire me with their dedication to collective governance and open source. Here's to 25 more years! 🥂

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Image Cooperative @image.coop · 16/09/2026

Just to keep the quote-post stack growing... 24(.5) hours until our next #OMEZarr office hours! Chris Barnes from @gerbi-gmb.de will be available for AMA on OME-Zarr. Thurs. Sep 17 @ 1700 CEST.

White text on dark blue saying, "OME-ZARR OFFICE HOURS. New schedule, more time zones! Our office hours now rotate over 3 time zones so more of our community can join in. See the full schedule and
add to your calendar: ngff.openmicroscopy.org/community/#office-hours -- Let's make OME-Zarr more accessible--together! 👋🏼"

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Image Cooperative @image.coop · 09/09/2026

OME-Zarr Office Hours in <24h! Ask anything about OME-Zarr, and/or join Draga Doncila Pop and @kevinyamauchi.bsky.social working on oztest, which generates test cases for ome-zarr libraries. Thu Sep 10 @ 9am Paris / 5pm Melbourne github.com/German-BioIm... ngff.openmicroscopy.org/community/#o...

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Image Cooperative @image.coop · 03/09/2026

Our next OME-Zarr office hours are in just under 24h! Pacific-friendly this week: 8am Fri Tokyo / 9am Fri Melbourne / 4pm Thu San Francisco. Come ask any and all OME-Zarr questions! Or watch @jni.codes and Draga Doncila Pop work on RFC-4 support in napari! ngff.openmicroscopy.org/community/#o...

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German BioImaging @gerbi-gmb.de · 28/08/2026

"What the heck is…OME-zarr/NGFF" Demystifying bioimaging tech: no jargon, no judgment, just real conversation with @jo-soltwedel.bsky.social on the latest tools & trends. 📅 Sept 3, 1–2:30 PM (Zoom) Register: t1p.de/0byxl | Infos: t1p.de/zkcnd #opensource #ngff #ome #bioimaging

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Image Cooperative @image.coop · 27/08/2026

The next OME-Zarr Office Hours is coming up in just over 2h! 8am SFO / 11am NYC / 5pm Paris. Come ask any questions about OME-Zarr, and/or watch @kevinyamauchi.bsky.social live-convert an HCS (High Content Screening) dataset to RFC-8 syntax! ngff.openmicroscopy.org/community/#o...

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Image Cooperative @image.coop · 19/08/2026

Our next office hours session is coming up in just under 22h! 2026-08-20 at 9am Paris/12:30pm Delhi/5pm Melbourne. Ask us anything about OME-Zarr and/or watch @jni.codes attempt to live-release the experimental 0.9dev1 version (including RFCs 3 & 4) with @joshmoore.bsky.social's help!

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eurobioimaging.bsky.social @eurobioimaging.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

At the next #NGFFCafe, Marvin Albert (ETH Zurich) will present 𝗺𝘂𝗹𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗶𝗲𝘄-𝘀𝘁𝗶𝘁𝗰𝗵𝗲𝗿, a Python package for scalable stitching/alignment/fusion of multi-view, tiled & multimodal image acquisitions. Join us! 🗓️ Thursday, July 30 🕚️ 11 am CEST 📍 Online Register⤵️ us02web.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

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Image Cooperative @image.coop · 01/07/2026

Earlier in June, we had our first in-person meeting at @embl.org (thank you for hosting us!), joined by representatives from Glencoe, Fideus Labs, @gerbi-gmb.de, and @scalableminds.com (+Dundee & Janelia on zoom) to start our OME-Zarr 1.0 project. More details to come, but it was fun and productive!

OME-Zarr collaborators having lunch together at the EMBL cafeteria

OME-Zarr working group discussing in a meeting room

Juan talking about Image Cooperative at an EMBL seminar room

hackathon participants having dinner in Heidelberg

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Image Cooperative @image.coop · 25/06/2026

We're excited to help organize the OME-Zarr Office Hours with a new rotating schedule starting today! 🎉 Whether you're using OME-Zarr today or just curious to learn more, we'd love to see you there. 📅 Full schedule: ngff.openmicroscopy.org/community

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Image Cooperative @image.coop · 16/06/2026

Keeping track of OME-Zarr support across the ecosystem isn't always easy. Over the past few weeks, we've been speaking with stakeholders about experiences, successes, and remaining gaps. Here is our snapshot of where things stand and where effort may be most valuable next: image.coop/blog/posts/2...

image.coop

OME-Zarr Pulse Check: Spec, Tooling, and Community – Image Cooperative

Feedback and insights from chatting to the community and analysing ecosystem data over the last six weeks.

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Image Cooperative @image.coop · 08/06/2026

Today was the first time the five of us were in a room together. 🥲

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Image Cooperative @image.coop · 08/06/2026

Image Coop at the @embl.org chicken coop! Thanks to @erickratamero.com for hosting us, for the tour, and for the photo!

The Image Cooperative team (left to right: Draga Doncila Pop, Eric Perlman, Josh Moore, Juan Nunez-Iglesias, Kevin Yamauchi) helping feed the chickens at the EMBL chicken coop. Photo by Erick Ratamero who was on chicken duty at the time and was also kindly hosting us.

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Image Cooperative @image.coop · 29/05/2026

Some initial results from the live survey at the recent #OME-Zarr Community Call for you to ponder over the weekend. Thoughts, as always, welcome! 🤔

Slide titled "What keeps you engaged with OME-Zarr?" with colored boxes sized to match the number of responses:

## Community (15)
- Great people!
- Delightful people
- Very knowledgable approachable people in the community
- Job, but also exciting to support the community
- People care
- Friendly community
- open communication with the community
- Awesome community
- The community x7

## Value & Trajectory (13)
- moving towards 1.0
- we're almost there :)
- The momentum
- It is the future
- hope
- Love the vision
- finally having the One True Format
- Format is useful and things are happening!
- very promising to handle large data in the future, nothing else seems to provide this
- Data is too big for anything else
- Better format to handle big data
- Potential to solve difficult/modern data problems.
- Obvious value of ome zarr

## Outreach (4)
- very good outreach!
- I'm new here but I will be back! :)
- Curiosity
- Staying updated

## Open (2)
- Open
- Open source

## Flexible (2)
- Versatile
- Flexible

## Misc. (9)
- Useful
- Fair data
- Right technology
- Making hard problems easier
- Need to be able to support end users
- I want to be able to access the benefits
- Scverse uses OME-Zarr as a backbone for Spatialdata object
- "pressure" from the repos, as the only accepted format
- The fame and money

Slide titled "What keeps you engaged with OME-Zarr?" with colored boxes matching the number of responses.

# Large data / Scalability (13)
- Dealing with large images
- Large data support
- large data handling
- Sharing large datasets
- scalability x4
- Big data x3
- Scalable x2

## Cloud native (9)
- Works in the cloud and locally
- Cloud support
- Cloud data native
- Cloud native brick storage
- cloud native x3
- Native cloud support x2

## Remote access (5)
- Streaming support x2
- streamable
- deposit data once and everything else just uses the S3-URL
- deposit somewhere once, access/index it from everywhere

## Community (5)
- It is represented by an international community
- Large Community support and buy in
- Community support
- good community support
- community driven

## Performance (5)
- Efficient storage, transfer and sharing
- Lazy Loading
- Rapid loading over network
- Parallel IO
- Easy browsing and parallel computing on large datasets

## Standardisation (3)
- Standardisation x2
- Standardization

## Chunking (3)
- Chunking
- Data in chunks
- Multiscale, chunked access

## Flexible (3)
- Flexible x2
- Extensible

## Open (3)
- Openness x2
- Open

## FAIRness (2)
- FAIRness x2

## Misc. (8)
- Multimodal images
- Independence on compute hardware
- Interoperability
- Remote visualization
- Easy visualisation
- Human readable
- vendor agnostic
- growing acceptance

Slide titled "What are the drawbacks of OME-Zarr?" with colored boxes sized to match the number of entries:

## Tooling Support (14)
- Tools have unclear incompatibilities
- Lack of generalised processing tools
- Too many libraries with different features
- lack of a single cannonical library for python
- "unclear tool eco-system / unclear features / important features missing"
- Most easy to use tools focus on visualisation only, not processing
- not yet enough interoperability with different tools, but it gets more
- What tool and version supports what and how to choose reasonable settings
- Easy to Load in FIJI
- Fiji support
- Using traditional Fiji 2D algorithms on OME Zarr is not efficient
- OMERObility
- OMERO support incomplete
- Traditional orthogonal 3D viewer is still lacking

## Evolving spec. (13)
- evolving spec x4
- Not stable enough yet
- Unstable spec
- Not finished
- not stable
- Not meeting all requirements yet
- Changing specification
- Might there be massive (potentially breaking) changes in future?
- Missing metadata
- Missing flexibility

## User accessibility (9)
- Too technical x2
- Complexity x2
- user comfort
- Difficult to access for end users
- Hard to use if not computationally comfortable
- giving access to s3 to biologists
- Not entirely supporting biologists

## File systems (7)
- Too many files
- Many small files
- Many files
- inodes
- Amount of files
- problem on traditional filesystem
- HPC use

## Version confusion (4)
- Fracture between Zarr v2 v3, omezarr v4, v5
- confusion with versions of zarr and versions of ome-ngff
- Hard to know which tool and version supports what
- Is ome NGFF equal to ome.zarr?

## Infrastructure (4)
- Authentication
- lack of good data management tools (auth, groups, etc)
- lack of object storage infrastructure
- Network performance/overhead

## Compression (3)
- No RGB compression
- No lossy compression
- Codec support

## Vendor support (3)
- No vendor support
- Missing features for vendors
- not y…

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Image Cooperative @image.coop · 26/05/2026

Getting to know who's in the room at the first session of the #OME-Zarr Community Call. If you missed it, join for the second session to share your thoughts. Let's grow that 'curious' bubble! 🫧 forum.image.sc/t/join-us-fo...

Screenshot of a mentimeter poll titled, "How are you involved with OME-Zarr? Select all that apply". The results are:

3 - Curious/not actively using OME-Zarr. 12 - Tool developer. 11 - Spec contributor. 12 - OME-Zarr data user/Analyst. 6 - Other

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Image Cooperative @image.coop · 22/05/2026

We want to hear from you about your experience using the OME-Zarr ecosystem and how we can improve it! We are joining the upcoming OME-NGFF community call to introduce ourselves to the community and to collect your feedback (May 26, 9AM and 5PM CET). See you there! forum.image.sc/t/join-us-fo...

forum.image.sc

Join us for the next OME-NGFF Community Call on Tuesday May 26, 2026 9:00 CET and 17:00 CET!

Dear all, We are delighted to announce our Q2 OME-NGFF Community Call to be held on Tuesday May 26! As usual, we will repeat the agenda over two time slots to welcome participants from everywhere aro...

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Tiago Lubiana @tiagolubiana.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

great first presentation of the @image.coop, by @perlman.bsky.social exciting stuff! #GIDE2026

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Image Cooperative @image.coop · 06/05/2026

Member Eric Perlman takes the stage at @embl.org to announce our launch as an international worker co-op for #OSS scientific imaging software. First task supported by @biohub.org is accelerating #OMEZarr towards a 1.0 alpha early 2027. Stay tuned! image.coop #GIDE2026 @gideproject.bsky.social

A screenshot of Eric's title slide, saying "The role of COOPeration in global imaging. Eric Perlman. Member, Image Cooperative" in Atkinson Hyperlegible font in black on white. The footer is a subtle pink-to-green bar with the hexagonal ball as a separator. The text in the footer says "Image Cooperative Ltd."

A photo of Eric behind the mic at EMBL with the first slide as described in the other image being shown by the projector.

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Image Cooperative @image.coop · 29/04/2026

Where better to hear the community's thoughts on #OMEZarr!

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Image Cooperative @image.coop · 28/04/2026

Thrilled to join #ome2026! Reach out to Eric or Josh if you want to chat.

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Josh Moore @joshmoore.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

Really excited to finally share this more widely. This is exactly the kind of work we hoped the cooperative could support—helping turn strong community momentum around #OMEZarr into something more coordinated and sustained. Very curious to hear what people think.

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Image Cooperative @image.coop · 22/04/2026

Our first project is live. ✨ With support from @biohub.org, @image.coop is coordinating work across the #OMEZarr community to help move the standard toward 1.0—supporting both implementation and the coordination needed to get there. More details in our latest post: image.coop/blog/posts/2...

image.coop

Image Cooperative’s first order of business: helping push the OME-Zarr standard forward – Image Cooperative

Announcing our first partnership and how we hope to contribute to OME-Zarr

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Image Cooperative @image.coop · 16/03/2026

Hello, world! We are starting a worker cooperative to build, maintain, teach, and support open source scientific imaging software. image.coop/blog/posts/2...

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