Aperio SVS Slides in the Browser
Open the slides your Aperio scanner saves, as they are. Nothing to convert, nothing to upload. A large slide starts showing right away, because the viewer reads only the part you look at.
How It Opens
- One file on your disk, in any browser. Drop it on the viewer, or click Open Image and Choose File. See Local Files.
- A folder of slides, in Chrome and Edge. One slide opens, several show a list. See Local Files.
- An address:
https://,s3://orgs://. Paste it under Open Image. See Remote URLs. - Private data, with a private link or a token. See Private Images and Slides.
What You Will See
- The slide. Zoom from the whole slide down to single cells.
- Label and Macro. The label photo and the overview photo appear under the slide's name. Click one to enlarge it. A label may show patient details. The viewer shows it and never saves or sends it.
- Compression. Slides saved as JPEG or JPEG 2000 open.
- Colour profile. A slide that carries its scanner's colour profile is drawn with it. ICC in the RGB settings turns it off. See Channels.
- Pixel size and magnification. Both come from the slide, so measurements read in µm and the zoom bar shows 20x or 40x. To set your own, see Pixel Size and Magnification.
Annotations
Draw, measure and label shapes on the slide from the Annotations panel, or import a GeoJSON file. See Annotations.
If a Slide Does Not Open
The viewer tells you why.
| What the file has | What the viewer says |
|---|---|
| More than 4 GB | This SVS file is larger than 4 GB. The viewer cannot read it yet. |
| Another compression | This SVS file uses a compression the viewer cannot read yet (LZW). |
| Grey, 16-bit or more than three channels | This SVS file is not 8-bit RGB. The viewer cannot read it yet. |
| Not saved in tiles | This SVS file is not stored in tiles. The viewer cannot read it yet. |
| Not an Aperio file | This file is not an Aperio SVS file. |
| Damaged or cut short | This SVS file looks damaged or incomplete. |
Another slide format? Convert it to OME-Zarr. How to Convert Any Microscopy File to OME-Zarr shows how.
Measuring Pixel Values
Safari draws JPEG slides with its own decoder, so pixel values differ slightly from Chrome and Firefox. For pixel measurements, use Chrome or Firefox.
Public Slides to Try
OpenSlide shares test slides in its Aperio folder, CC0. Download a slide, then drop it on the viewer.
More places to find public data: Remote URLs.
For Your IT Team
To open a slide by address, the server must answer byte-range requests and allow them through CORS. For a bucket, allow GET and the Range header in its CORS rules. What the Server Needs has the details.
When a server cannot send parts of a file, the viewer says so. Download the slide and open it from your computer.
Image credits
The screenshots use CMU-1.svs from the OpenSlide test data, CC0. See Sample Data and Credits.
Privacy
The slide is read in your browser. Opening an SVS counts as one opened image of the kind "Aperio SVS file". The file name and address are never recorded. See the privacy policy.
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