Omeka-S and IIIF

In case you are not able to install and host a IIIF server yourself (check this article), you can always try to get an IIIF instance up and running on a shared hosting account. Most good hosting providers offer a lot of applications to be installed on a shared hosting account with minimal efforts, either via a DirectAdmin or a Plesk panel, and that always includes open source content management systems, such as: Drupal, Joomla, Omeka and Wordpress. Of these - in this case - especially Omeka is interesting. It's not just a content management system, but rather a web publishing platform designed for managing and displaying digital collections, particularly from archives, libraries and museums. It comes in two versions: Omeka Classic and Omeka-S, of which the latter supports LOD and IIIF. Read on for an instruction to install Omeka-S and IIIF on shared hosting.

Once you get yourself a shared hosting account, open the DirectAdmin or Plesk panel for it and go to the "Applications Browser". Over there go to the section "Apps for Content Management" and click on the icon for Omeka-S.

Next a new screen will appear with a lot of information about Omeka-S, including a screenshot of its back-end dashboard. That same new screen will have a button saying "Install Application" at the top right, click on it and a new screen will appear in which you will have to make a few choices:

In the part "Location" you will have to indicate whether you want Omeka-S to be installed in the root of your shared hosting account or in a subdirectory or a subdomain of it. In case of a subfolder, you can simpy add that to the url of the root of your shared hosting account which is provided as default, but in case of a subdomain, you will have to make sure that this specific subdomain exists before this installation procedure (something which you can do in another part of the DirectAdmin or Plesk panel).
In the part "Version" you can choose which version of Omeka-S you want to be installed and the latest version (supported by your hosting provider) is provided by default, so it's best to accept that. In this part you can also choose which language version you would like Omeka-S to run (by default: English) and whether you want your hosting provider to take care of regular backups of your Omeka-S instance.
In the part "Settings" you have to provide an email address and password for the administrator section of your Omeka-S instance as well as a suitable name for your Omeka-S webinterface.
Finally, in the part "Advanced" you can choose between managing further advanced settings automatically (i.e. let the DirectAdmin or Plesk panel take care of that for you) or manually (i.e. do all that yourself). The default option "automatically" is the best.

Now you can click on the "Install"-button at the bottom right of this screen to actually start the installation process.

You will return to the screen "Installed Applications" of the DirectAdmin or Plesk panel of your shared hosting account, where you will see a progress bar for the installation of your Omeka-S instance and after a while that installation process will be concluded, so you can access the url of your Omeka-S instance (as provided in the part "Location" mentioned above) and over there you see a basic (empty) webinterface plus the possibility to log in into the administrator section of your Omeka-S instance (as provided in the part "Settings" mentioned above).

When you log in as administrator, using the credentials you just have registered while installing Omeka-S, you will see this basic administrator dashboard interface:

figure 1: Omeka-S administrator interface.

I will not go into detail about all you can do in this interface for setting up your Omeka-S website, because there is an extensive user manual for this available including a nice 10-minute introduction video, but I will concentrate on what extra actions you will have to perform before your Omeka-S instance is ready to work with IIIF.

For making your Omeka-S instance IIIF-compatible you will have to install three extra modules:

IIIF server for Omeka-S
IIIF image server for Omeka-S
Universal Viewer for Omeka-S

Every extra module for Omeka-S is available via this overview: https://omeka.org/s/modules/, so also the three modules mentioned above:

So visit these three url's and download the three modules and make sure you download the version of these modules that is compatible with the version of your Omeka-S instance.

Note: when you download the IIIF server module and you read the instructions for it, you will notice that it needs to have the "Common"-module installed first, so make sure you download that too: https://omeka.org/s/modules/Common/.

When you're done downloading, you will have four zip-files and for Omeka-S version 4.1.1. at the time of writing this - 20th of May 2025- these are named:

Common-3.4.67.zip
IiifServer-3.6.25.zip
ImageServer-3.6.20.zip
UniversalViewer-3.6.10-4.1.0

Now unzip these files and make sure you wil end up with four folders named:

Common
IiifServer
ImageServer
UniversalViewer

Now you will have to install these four modules in your Omeka-S instance. When you look at the option: "Modules" in the administrator dashboard of your Omeka-S instance, you will see there is nothing there yet:

figure 2: Omeka-S administrator interface - Modules option.

All you have to do to get the four modules you have just downloaded in there, is to upload the folders to the "modules"-folder in the root of your Omeka-S instance, for example using FileZilla.

When you refresh the "Modules"-option of your Omeka-S administrator dashboard afterwards, you will see that the four modules needed for IIIF compatibility are ready to be installed inside your Omeka-S instance:

figure 3: Omeka-S administrator interface - Modules option with IIIF modules.

Now click on the "Install"-button for each module, starting from the top with the "Common" module.

When you install the three 'dedicated' IIIF modules, you will be shown a configuration screen after these modules have been activated. You can discard this for now and click on the "Submit"-button at the top right of the screen to finalise the installation procedure. Later on you and always go back to the configuration screen of each of these modules via the specific button in the "Modules"-option.

After you are done with the installation of the four modules, the "Modules"-option of your Omeka-S instance will look like this:

figure 4: Omeka-S administrator interface - Modules option with IIIF modules installed.

Now for each digital object you register in your Omeka-S instance you will have IIIF functionality at your disposal, for example a build-in Universal Viewer in your Omeka-S website as you can see below:

figure 5: Omeka-S website - digital object via Universal Viewer - 1.

figure 6: Omeka-S website - digital object via Universal Viewer - 2.

Note: in case you run into an error when uploading a digital object in Omeka-S installed on a shared hosting account, it's possible you have to make a change in the file called: "local.config.php", which is located in the folder "config" in the root of your Omeka-S instance. Download that file via FileZilla and at the end of line 30 change: "ImageMagick" into: "Imagick". Then upload this changed file to the "config" folder again, overwriting the existing file, restart your Omeka-S instance and your problem will likely be solved.

Omeka-S and IIIF

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