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 areall
,ll
,lr
,ul
,ur
,t
, andb
.image_type
:jacket
orplate
. 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 are2
,4
,8
,16
,32
, and64
.
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