Imaging data, whether from cameras, satellites, drones, “go-pro”, multibeams, or sonar devices despite linked to spatial data are not embedded in traditional relational databases, rather tend to be stored separately and accessed from one or more directories. As a result, managing images turns to be problematic and leads to cases of duplication, unnecessary use of space in servers or standalone machines, laborious searching and convoluted sharing.

We will present OMERO, an open image data management platform for storing, sharing, searching and accessing multimodal imaging data. OMERO is an application originally built for biological microscopy, but which we have shown can also be used for ecological and environmental studies. OMERO also enables the integration with analytical tools such as R, ImageJ, Fiji, KNIME and Matlab, allowing scientists to derive quantitative outputs from large collections of imaging data.

After discussing about the challenges we had to face, e.g. the ingestion of geospatial image formats, we will showcase our applications of OMERO with satellite and drone imagery, underwater photography, otholiths slides and the integration of tools for object identification, photo-id catalogues, and pattern analysis.