Plate and Jacket Images

The Starglass API makes available photographs of the plates and their associated jackets. We make available both the highest resolution images we have available as well as thumbnails of those images. For most plates, these photographs are the only extant records of the annotations that were made on the plates, as for most of DASCH’s history, the annotations were cleaned off of the plates prior to scanning.

Note that for some photographs taken early in DASCH’s history, the plates were photographed in multiple sections rather than in their entirety. In these cases, the photographs are available in multiple portions, each of which is a separate image. All available images can be seen by querying the plate endpoint of the API. Specific portions can be requested by passing the portion query parameter to the plate image endpoint.

Accessing Images

Plate images are available at /plates/p/<plate_id>/download where <plate_id> is the ID of the plate you want to download the image for. The response will be a redirect to a temporary link to the image.

Notes on Thumbnails

Thumbnail images are created on the fly the first time that any plate image at a certain size is requested. Given this, a 404 error may be returned if the thumbnail image has not yet been created. If this occurs, try the request again after a few seconds.

Available Images

  • Plate Images:

    • Full resolution images of the plate itself.

    • Plate images are exclusively available as JPEGs. Unfortunately, no non-compressed versions of the plate images are available.

    • Thumbnails of the plate images.

  • Jacket Images:

    • Full resolution images of the plate jacket.

    • Jacket images are available as both JPEGs and TIFFs.

    • Thumbnails of the jacket images.

Query Parameters

  • portion: The portion of the plate or jacket to return. If not provided, the full image will be returned where available. If only partial photographs are available, the portion parameter will be required to specify which portion to return. Acceptable values are all, ll, lr, ul, ur, t, and b .

  • image_type: jacket or plate. If not provided, the plate image will be returned by default.

  • thumbnail_ratio: The ratio of the thumbnail image to the full image. If not provided, the full image will be returned. Acceptable values are 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, and 64 .

Example Queries

Downloading a Plate Image

curl -L "https://api.starglass.cfa.harvard.edu/public/plates/p/a00001/download" -o plate.jpg

Downloading a Jacket Image

curl -L "https://api.starglass.cfa.harvard.edu/public/plates/p/a00001/download?image_type=jacket" -o jacket.jpg

Downloading a Plate Thumbnail

curl -L "https://api.starglass.cfa.harvard.edu/public/plates/p/a00001/download?thumbnail_ratio=4" -o plate_thumbnail.jpg

Downloading a Jacket Thumbnail

curl -L "https://api.starglass.cfa.harvard.edu/public/plates/p/a00001/download?image_type=jacket&thumbnail_ratio=4" -o jacket_thumbnail.jpg

Downloading a Portion of a Plate Image

curl -L "https://api.starglass.cfa.harvard.edu/public/plates/p/a00045/download?portion=ll" -o plate_portion_ll.jpg