LOCI Bio-Formats package

Hi everyone,

Today I have the pleasure of announcing the LOCI Bio-Formats package, a 
Java library for reading and writing popular microscopy image formats, 
written by Melissa Linkert and myself. It currently supports reading 24 
formats, and writing a few as well (TIFF stacks, JPEG, AVI and QuickTime).

You can find full details, including download links, online at:

   http://www.loci.wisc.edu/ome/formats.html

This work grew out of file format support within VisBio 
(http://www.loci.wisc.edu/visbio); a forthcoming major release of VisBio 
will utilize the Bio-Formats package directly.

The library provides support for parsing metadata for supported formats, 
as well as representation of this metadata in standard OME-XML format, 
using our LOCI OME-XML library 
(http://www.loci.wisc.edu/ome/loci-ome-xml.html), but the OME-XML 
standardization logic should be considered very early (alpha status).

By dropping the loci_formats.jar file into your ImageJ plugins folder, a 
new entry called "LOCI Bio-Formats" will appear, capable of opening any 
of the supported formats.

For those of you who use Handle Extra File Types 
(http://rsb.info.nih.gov/ij/plugins/file-handler.html), it is possible 
to add support for LOCI Bio-Formats. Just extract the bio_formats.jar 
file and take a look at the loci/formats/LociPlugin.java source file. At 
the bottom is a commented-out block of code that when added to 
HandleExtraFileTypes.java will enable automatic calling of the 
Bio-Formats package.

There is also a simple viewer/converter bundled with the package, 
accessible by double-clicking the JAR file (or "java -jar 
bio_formats.jar" from the command line).

Please let me know if you have any comments, questions or issues 
regarding the package.

Cheers,
-Curtis