Plugin Ideas

Below is a list of potential future plugins for Annotorious. This is just a collection of all ideas that were collected over time (and doesn't necessarily mean we're planning - or will have the time - to do any of this). In case you are specifically interested in having (or coding!) anything from this list, or want to add a new idea, drop us a line.

• Freehand drawing plugin. A plugin that adds a freehand selector. Should work on mobile as well.
• Vanilla REST storage plugin. Very much needed. A storage plugin that wraps the common code needed for plain JSON/REST storage of annotations. The plugin would assume a plain and simple REST API for GETting, POSTing, UPDATEing and DELETEing annotations and handle the client side stuff. It would also assume that the server might, optionally, add username, avatar and timestamp fields to the response JSON, and add these fields to the popup bubbles appropriately if they exist.
• Support for replies (issue #34). Very much needed as well. Reply-list (or -thread) functionality in the spirit of the Annotator reply plugin.
• Replies, part 2. I recently stumbled across moot, which is an embeddable discussion platform (as it were). It would be interesting whether moot (or another service like it?) could be embedded into Annotorious, to facilitate threaded discussion for annotations.
• Heroku Backend. A possible 'cloud' storage backend based on Heroku, specifically the MongoDB or CouchDB add-ons.
• Google Drive as backend (issue #38). A possible 'cloud' backend for Annotorious based on the Google Drive API?
• Dropbox as a backend (issue #63). Problem: users want to use Annotorious but don't have the infrastructure or technical skills to run a back-end. Possible Solution: a "Dropbox" plug-in that stores all created annotations in a (shared) Dropbox folder. See this article on dropbox.js for a similar example
• Highlight All. It would be great to have an option to highlight (and show the text of) all annotations, rather than just a single one. Technically, this is not (easily) possibly, since there is only one popup element that's shared among all annotations on an image. Practically, it may also not (always) make much sense, since the image would just be cluttered. A possible workaround (to be implemented in this plugin) could be to place a number on each annotation, and then superimpose a numbered list somewhere.
• Export Annotated Image. It would be nice if one could use Annotorious as an "authoring tool" to annotate an image - and then have a button that exports the annotated image as a static HTML/JS snippet, for standalone-publishing, embedding in a blog post, etc. This could be easily achieved through a plugin that renders the snippet and exposes it for download as a data URI or a Blob.