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How to Build a JavaScript Image Viewer with Viewer.js

Hulya Karakaya
Illustration: How to Build a JavaScript Image Viewer with Viewer.js
Web JavaScript How To Image Viewer

In this post, we provide you with a step-by-step guide outlining how to build a JavaScript image viewer with the Viewer.js library.

In the first part, we’ll walk through how to render and customize an image viewer in the browser with Viewer.js. In the second part, we’ll look at how to build a fully featured image viewer with the PSPDFKit image viewer library. Our image viewer library provides some additional benefits, including:

  • A prebuilt and polished UI for an improved user experience
  • 15+ prebuilt annotation tools to enable document collaboration
  • Browser-based text editing, page cropping, merging, rotating, and more
  • Support for more file types with client-side PDF, MS Office, and image viewing
  • Dedicated support from engineers to speed up integration

Viewer.js a JavaScript image viewer library that lets you render and view image documents in a web browser. It gives you the ability to zoom in and out, rotate, and flip images. It also supports keyboard shortcuts for navigating through images.

Installing Viewer.js

You can install Viewer.js as an npm package or via a CDN from cdnjs.

A CDN is a content delivery network or a server that hosts libraries, like Bootstrap.

In this tutorial, you’ll use the CDN method. Copy the JavaScript and CSS files from the CDN.

Create a blank index.html file and paste the following:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
	<head>
		<meta charset="UTF-8" />
		<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge" />
		<meta
			name="viewport"
			content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0"
		/>
		<title>Viewer.js</title>

		<script
			src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/viewerjs/1.10.5/viewer.min.js"
			integrity="sha512-i5q29evO2Z4FHGCO+d5VLrwgre/l+vaud5qsVqQbPXvHmD9obORDrPIGFpP2+ep+HY+z41kAmVFRHqQAjSROmA=="
			crossorigin="anonymous"
			referrerpolicy="no-referrer"
		></script>
		<link
			rel="stylesheet"
			href="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/viewerjs/1.10.5/viewer.css"
			integrity="sha512-c7kgo7PyRiLnl7mPdTDaH0dUhJMpij4aXRMOHmXaFCu96jInpKc8sZ2U6lby3+mOpLSSlAndRtH6dIonO9qVEQ=="
			crossorigin="anonymous"
			referrerpolicy="no-referrer"
		/>
	</head>
</html>

Creating the Markup

Now, create a container div for an image gallery and create a list for the images:

<body>
	<div id="gallery">
		<ul class="images">
			<li>
				<img src="image-1.png" alt="blue background" />
			</li>
			<li>
				<img src="image-2.png" alt="gray background" />
			</li>
			<li>
				<img src="image-3.png" alt="black background" />
			</li>
			<li>
				<img src="image-4.png" alt="green background" />
			</li>
			<li>
				<img src="image-5.png" alt="red background" />
			</li>
			<li>
				<img src="image-6.jpeg" alt="pink background" />
			</li>
		</ul>
	</div>
	<script src="script.js"></script>
</body>

You can now interact with the viewer library. Create a script.js file and add the following code:

const gallery = document.getElementById('gallery');
const viewer = new Viewer(gallery);

Here, you accessed the gallery container and created a new instance of the Viewer class, which enables you to start interacting with the viewer library.

Launching the Website Locally

You can use the Visual Studio Code Live Server extension to serve your website. Right-click on the HTML file and choose the Open with Live Server option from the context menu.

live server screenshot

Serving the Website Locally

Another option is to use the serve package as a simple HTTP server. If you want to use that option, follow the steps below.

  1. Install the serve package:

npm install --global serve

  1. Serve the contents of the current directory:

serve -l 8080 .

  1. Navigate to http://localhost:8080 to view the website.

Customizing the Toolbar

You can customize the toolbar by passing options to your viewer instance. You can view all the toolbar options in the Viewer.js documentation:

const viewer = new Viewer(gallery, { options });

For the custom toolbar, use the following options:

const gallery = document.getElementById('gallery');
const viewer = new Viewer(gallery, {
	// Custom toolbar.
	toolbar: {
		oneToOne: true,

		prev() {
			viewer.prev(true);
		},

		play: true,

		next() {
			viewer.next(true);
		},

		download() {
			const a = document.createElement('a');

			a.href = viewer.image.src;
			a.download = viewer.image.alt;
			document.body.appendChild(a);
			a.click();
			document.body.removeChild(a);
		},
	},
});

  • Setting oneToOne to true shows the aspect ratio of the image.

  • The prev and next functions show the previous and next image.

  • The play function shows the image in fullscreen mode.

  • The download option helps you download the image.

Information

Interact with the sandbox by clicking the left rectangle icon and selecting Editor > Show Default Layout. To edit, sign in with GitHub — click the rectangle icon again and choose Sign in. To preview the result, click the rectangle icon once more and choose Editor > Embed Preview. For the full example, click the Open Editor button. Enjoy experimenting with the project!

PSPDFKit JavaScript Image Viewer

We offer a commercial JavaScript image viewer library that can easily be integrated into your web application. Our JavaScript viewer supports rendering JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and PDF files in any modern browser and on any mobile device without any plugins.

Example of Our JavaScript Image Viewer

To see our image viewer in action, upload a JPG, PNG, or TIFF file by selecting Choose Example > Standalone > Open Document. Once your image is displayed in the viewer, you can try drawing freehand, adding a note, or applying a crop or an e-signature.

Requirements to Get Started

Adding PSPDFKit to Your Project

  1. Install the pspdfkit package from npm. If you prefer, you can also download PSPDFKit for Web manually:

npm install pspdfkit

  1. For PSPDFKit for Web to work, it’s necessary to copy the directory containing all the required library files (artifacts) to the assets folder. Use the following command to do this:

cp -R ./node_modules/pspdfkit/dist/ ./assets/

Make sure your assets directory contains the pspdfkit.js file and a pspdfkit-lib directory with the library assets.

Integrating into Your Project

  1. Add the image you want to display to your project’s directory. You can use our demo image as an example.

  2. Add an empty <div> element with a defined height to where PSPDFKit will be mounted:

<div id="pspdfkit" style="height: 100vh;"></div>

  1. Include pspdfkit.js in your HTML page:

<script src="assets/pspdfkit.js"></script>

  1. Initialize PSPDFKit for Web in JavaScript by calling PSPDFKit.load():

<script>
	PSPDFKit.load({
		container: "#pspdfkit",
  		document: "image.png" // Add the path to your image here.
	})
	.then(function(instance) {
		console.log("PSPDFKit loaded", instance);
	})
	.catch(function(error) {
		console.error(error.message);
	});
</script>

You can see the full index.html file below:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
	<head>
		<title>My App</title>
		<!-- Provide proper viewport information so that the layout works on mobile devices. -->
		<meta
			name="viewport"
			content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, minimum-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0, user-scalable=no"
		/>
	</head>
	<body>
		<!-- Element where PSPDFKit will be mounted. -->
		<div id="pspdfkit" style="height: 100vh"></div>

		<script src="assets/pspdfkit.js"></script>
		<script>
			PSPDFKit.load({
				container: '#pspdfkit',
				document: 'image.png', // Add the path to your image here.
			})
				.then(function (instance) {
					console.log('PSPDFKit loaded', instance);
				})
				.catch(function (error) {
					console.error(error.message);
				});
		</script>
	</body>
</html>

Resulting page

Adding Even More Capabilities

Once you’ve deployed your viewer, you can start customizing it to meet your specific requirements or easily add more capabilities. To help you get started, here are some of our most popular JavaScript guides:

Conclusion

In this article, you first learned how to build an image viewer with the Viewer.js library. In the second part, you walked through how to create an image viewer with PSPDFKit for Web.

At PSPDFKit, we offer a commercial, feature-rich, and completely customizable JavaScript Image viewer library that’s easy to integrate and comes with well-documented APIs to handle advanced use cases. Try it for free, or visit our demo to see it in action.

Related Products
PSPDFKit for Web

Product Page
Guides
API Docs
Example Projects

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