About OIV's retirement and the transition to online tools

Overview

As of December 31, 2019, the Offline Image Viewer (OIV) is no longer available for download and is no longer supported.

Artstor currently provides a cloud-based platform for the world’s digitized visual culture and tools for classroom teaching and research. The Offline Image Viewer (OIV) was one of many of the tools in the Artstor environment that facilitates teaching. The OIV was first developed in 2005, and today there are more dynamic, reliable, and user-friendly ways to support instructors in these tasks on on our online platform.

We know that some Artstor users relied on OIV as a central part of their teaching practice and we are committed to maintaining and enhancing support for classroom teaching in other formats. We have conducted interviews with the OIV and greater teaching community to ensure that we have the most informed picture of our users varied teaching practices to ensure that we are providing key functionality of OIV in more stable and universal formats.

Please read on to learn about the timeframe for this project and what you need to do to convert your OIV presentations into other formats. 

Timeline

• After June 14, 2019 users were no longer able to import image groups directly from Artstor to the OIV
• After the Fall of 2019, there were no further updates to the OIV 
• After December 31, 2019, the OIV was no longer available for download
• User support for the OIV ended on December 31, 2019

Will the OIV still work on my computer?

The OIV is no longer available for download, and support is no longer provided for the tool. However, the software will not be removed from your machine. The OIV may continue to work on your machine for a while, but as operating systems are updated, it will become less reliable. 

For this reason, we strongly recommend that you back up your presentations before they are unable to be recovered. 

Current teaching tools:

We are in the process of releasing new teaching tools that reproduce OIV’s functionality--in fact, some of the changes are already in place.

• Full-screen image viewer with zoom, compare, and quiz functionality
• The ability to zoom in and save a detail of an image to groups
• The ability to enter our full-screen viewer and comparison mode from a group

Upcoming changes:

• New export option: soon, you’ll be able to export your groups to Google Slides

If you use OIV to present the image groups you’ve made in Artstor…

You can go to back to your Groups in Artstor and export them as PowerPoint presentations. Exported PowerPoint presentations automatically place one image per slide, with the image data located in the presenter notes field.

Teaching with details

When you open a PowerPoint from Artstor in presentation mode (as you would while teaching), you can click on an image to open it in the Artstor viewer to zoom in on details. Alternatively, you can pre-save detail views of images to your Artstor groups and download them into your presentation.

Teaching with your own images

To add your own images to your Groups, you can upload them as JPEGs to your Artstor Personal Collection through the “Organize” menu before exporting to PowerPoint or Google Slides. This ensures the image is still linked to the image viewer, allowing you to zoom and pan as needed. As a bonus, it also allows you to share a URL to a complete image group with your students--who can then open it in Quiz mode to study as flashcards!

Looking to convert your OIV presentations to other file types? 
Read more on "Converting and Saving your OIV Presentations." 

Take a look at this video: using Artstor Groups for teaching off or online:

If you use OIV slides (complete with text) to present...

You should convert your existing OIV presentations to PowerPoint files. This will take all images in your presentation--whether they came from Artstor or not--and save them as a new presentation.

The easiest way to convert your OIV presentations to PowerPoint presentations is to download the latest version of OIV (available at bit.ly/oivdownload) and go to Go to File > Save As > Save Presentation to PPTX

Need more detailed instructions on how to convert your OIV presentations? 
 Visit Converting and Saving OIV Presentations

Teaching with details

If you previously used zoomable slides to show details in your presentation, download a detail view from Artstor and add it to your new PowerPoint presentation.

If you use the OIV palette to present...

If the images in your palette were sourced from your Groups in Artstor, you can open them on the Artstor platform and use the side-by-side comparison mode to select from all the images and compare and zoom using the online viewer.

If you have images from multiple sources (not just from your Groups in Artstor) in your palette, you will need to create OIV slides with these images. Once you have created slides, you should download them as a PowerPoint file.

Teaching with your own images

If you want to add your own images to your Groups, you can upload them as JPEGs to your Artstor Personal Collection through the “Organize” menu item.

If you project on multiple screens while teaching…

There are PowerPoint add-ons like PowerShow that allow you to present using multiple projectors.
We are currently exploring dual projector support for Artstor. If you have questions, please contact us.

If you want to share your OIV presentations with your students…

While in the OIV, you can save your presentations as PDFs by going to File > Print. Or, you can save them as PowerPoint files and share those.

If you use Artstor groups, you can generate a link to your group by using the Share menu in Artstor. This has the added benefit of allowing your students to open your groups in Quiz Mode and study them as flashcards.