One of my favorite features of Silverlight is Deep Zoom, which gives online images depth like you haven’t seen before. Zoom in and out of massive, hi-resolution imagery in a bandwidth efficient manner with just the scroll wheel of your mouse… it’s great stuff. (See some examples of Deep Zoom in action at deepzoomstudio.com.)

The only problem has been utilizing it. Deep Zoom requires preprocessing of images to create different levels of tiles in order to pull of its magic, and until now that’s been a client-side chore with a tool like Deep Zoom Composer. This is fairly lame for your average Joe, who just wants to upload a photo and have it “just work”.

Enter zoom.it from Microsoft’s Live Labs.

Point zoom.it at a web page or photo and it does all the work for you to “zoom it”. You can then host it on your own blog, like so.

The image above is from the Point Montana Lighthouse Hostel, where I stayed a night during my bike adventure from Portland to San Diego last year. (A trip I started a year ago today, coincidentally. :) I would have loved to have something like this available during my trip.

When posting a photo, normally you have to make a decision about the size. Should you post a larger photo so people can make out details better, or should you keep it smaller and conserve bandwidth and screen real estate? With Deep Zoom you get the best of both worlds – viewers only eat up as much bandwidth as what they look at, and if they want to dig into a photo, they can zoom in and even go full screen if they want for the greatest in detail.

Besides Silverlight, Zoom.it includes Seadragon AJAX support so even people without Silverlight installed can still enjoy your images. There are many other cool features I haven’t mentioned here, and it’s free for you to use – check it out!