We are a multi-site collaborative effort among academic laboratories and a number of commercial entities.
We produce open tools to support data management for microscopy. Designed to interact with existing commercial software, all OME formats and software are free, and all OME source code is available under the GNU General public license or more permissive open source licenses, or through a commercial license from Glencoe Software. Discover our tools on FAIRSharing.
OME developers are based in universities and research institutes around the world.
Meet the TeamsWe receive direct contribution to the OME software from groups and individuals.
See the ListWe collaborate with commercial imaging hardware and software manufacturers on their projects.
Get a Commercial LicenseOME seeks to build specifications and software that allow scientists open, flexible, scalable and performant access to their imaging data.
OME is committed to building and releasing high quality, open source, well-supported software for the scientific imaging community. Our tools should work regardless of location, processing environment or data type.
The project’s foundation is an open metadata specification, the OME Data Model. This defines and describes the metadata elements and relationships that the project uses and supports. Using this specification, we build and release:
An enterprise image data management platform that enables access, processing, sharing, analysis and where appropriate publication of scientific image data and metadata.
A software plug-in that reads >140 proprietary file formats and converts them to an open, OME-based model that any software can use.
OME-TIFF combines the popular, broadly supported TIFF format with an OME-based XML metadata header. OME-Zarr is a cloud-optimized format designed to address scalability issues with large imaging datasets.
All of OME’s work and projects are funded by peer-reviewed grants are undertaken as collaborations with academic, industrial or commercial partners, so that the development of new tools and capabilities is always tied to real world, scientific use cases. Each individual partnership produces specific extensions to Bio-Formats and OMERO and these are always distributed to the global OME community to maximize the return and benefit of work and investment.
© 2005-2025 University of Dundee & Open Microscopy Environment. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
OME source code is available under the GNU General public license or more permissive open source licenses, or through commercial license from Glencoe Software Inc.
OME, Bio-Formats, OMERO, IDR and their associated logos are trademarks of Glencoe Software Inc., which holds these marks to protect them on behalf of the OME community.
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Version: 2025.03.21