Stop proxying Image API request in irIIIFService #161
Description
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
As currently implemented, irIIIFService can’t support annotations, annotation lists/collections, or IIIF viewers other than Mirador. This is a real limitation for the Libraries, which have paid for services like FromThePage for nearly five years. FromThePage is built specifically to attach commenting annotations to IIIF manifests and to support crowdsourced transcription (workflows that depend on standard, stable IIIF image URLs).
The root of the problem is a hidden “feature” in irIIIFService. Instead of consistently using direct Cantaloupe image URLs (as defined in the delegates file), image requests are arbitrarily proxied through irIIIFService. These proxy URLs are unstable and break whenever irIIIFService restarts or encounters Redis issues.
This hasn’t surfaced as a major problem in our own collections mainly because Mirador is odd in design; it will attempt to load every HTTP link it finds, and the proxied URL gets created on-the-fly when Mirador requests a canvas ID (in a fairly arbitrary way). Other IIIF tools and annotation platforms, like FromThePage, expect stable, canonical image URLs and don’t work reliably with these transient proxy links.
To get around this, we've largely abandoned irIIIFService and started doing our own thing.
Describe the solution you'd like
I want to get rid of this feature of proxying image requests
Describe alternatives you've considered
If we can't do this, we will continue to just write our own iiif presentation services and not use irIIIFService for any thing advanced.
Additional context
Add any other context or screenshots about the feature request here.