Install openslide with Homebrew

Project links

• Homepage
• Repository

Commands and aliases

• openslide-quickhash1sum
• openslide-show-properties
• openslide-write-png
• slidetool

Project history

The OpenSlide GitHub repository was created in August 2010. A 2013 Journal of Pathology Informatics paper presented OpenSlide as a vendor-neutral C library for reading and manipulating digital slides from diverse vendor formats, motivated by the lack of a universal widespread format for whole-slide images.

The project grew into a small ecosystem with official Python and Java bindings. The website describes the C library, bindings, command-line tools, supported vendor formats, and LGPL-2.1 licensing, while the Python documentation explains why ordinary image libraries struggle with slides that can expand to tens of gigabytes.

Adoption history

OpenSlide became a common interoperability layer for open source digital pathology software because it hides vendor-specific storage details behind one API. Its support matrix includes Aperio, DICOM, Hamamatsu, Leica, MIRAX, Philips, Sakura, Ventana, Zeiss, generic tiled TIFF, and other formats documented by the project.

The library is packaged widely across Homebrew, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, Nix, MacPorts, and other distributions. That distribution breadth matters for scientific workflows, where Python packages, notebooks, image pipelines, and lab workstations often need the same native C library available underneath language bindings.

How it is used

Applications use OpenSlide to query slide dimensions and metadata, choose pyramid levels, read rectangular regions, generate thumbnails or Deep Zoom tiles, and avoid loading an entire slide into memory. The command-line tools expose common inspection and conversion tasks such as showing slide properties, writing PNG regions, and calculating quickhash values.

The API is intentionally narrow: it opens a slide, exposes properties and level information, and reads image regions. That simplicity is what lets higher-level packages in Python, Java, MATLAB integrations, and web viewers build digital pathology workflows over proprietary vendor data.

Why package nerds care

OpenSlide is package-significant because it is a native library that many language packages quietly depend on. The Homebrew formula is not just an executable install; it supplies the C ABI that Python wheels, scientific applications, and downstream pathology tools expect to find.

It also illustrates why packaging scientific file-format libraries is hard: the value is not a flashy CLI but stable decoding of many large, vendor-specific, tiled image formats across operating systems.

Timeline

• 2010-08-09: The public GitHub repository was created.
• 2013-09-27: The OpenSlide design and implementation paper was published in Journal of Pathology Informatics.
• OpenSlide 3.x: The C API exposed standardized properties such as vendor, quickhash, microns-per-pixel, and objective power across supported formats.
• OpenSlide 4.x: The project continued publishing C library releases along with Python and Java bindings.

Related projects

• Related projects include OpenSlide Python, OpenSlide Java, Deep Zoom viewers, digital pathology analysis pipelines, DICOM whole-slide imaging work, Bio-Formats-style microscopy tooling, and downstream packages that bind to the native OpenSlide C library.

Sources

• https://api.github.com/repos/openslide/openslide
• https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/openslide
• https://github.com/openslide/openslide
• https://openslide.org/
• https://openslide.org/api/openslide_8h.html
• https://openslide.org/api/python/
• https://openslide.org/docs/newformat/
• https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3815078/
• https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24244884/