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Exhibit home page

Overview and Benefits

While exhibit.so provides a free public service for creating exhibits from existing IIIF manifests, universities, museums, libraries, and archives can also run their own dedicated self-hosted Exhibit instance.

A self-hosted instance gives your organisation its own private cloud workspace, custom web domain, institutional sign-in, and built-in media hosting.

Key benefits of self-hosting

1. Your own domain and readable URLs

Host Exhibit on your institution's own domain (for example, exhibits.yourinstitution.org). Staff and students publish exhibits at clean, memorable web addresses under their username, such as exhibits.yourinstitution.org/aliceadams/the-book-of-kells.

2. Passwordless institutional sign-in

Restrict account creation to your organisation's approved email domains (such as @youruniversity.ac.uk or @yourmuseum.org). Users sign in with a one-click email link at /enter — with no passwords to manage or reset — and can optionally allow or disable anonymous exhibit creation for guest workshops (see Signing In).

3. Built-in File Manager and automatic IIIF generation

Not every item you want to teach with or exhibit is already in a IIIF catalogue. Self-hosted instances include a dedicated File Manager (/admin/files) where users can upload high-resolution images (JPEG, PNG, TIFF), 3D models (.glb), video (.mp4), and audio (.mp3) up to 200 MB per file.

Exhibit automatically:

  • tiles high-resolution images into fast deep-zoom pyramids
  • captures 2D thumbnail previews of 3D .glb models
  • extracts AI-suggested titles, summaries, and Wikidata subject tags
  • generates a standards-compliant IIIF Presentation 3.0 manifest for every uploaded file

4. Team collaboration across your organisation

Exhibits and uploaded files are shared with your organisation by default (and can be switched to private at any time). Colleagues can browse shared files in the editor, collaborate on exhibits from the Organisation tab in Exhibits, and rely on automatic edit locks so two people never overwrite each other's changes.

5. Gallery Wall Cards and standalone IIIF viewer

Generate print-ready physical museum labels (PDF, 300-DPI PNG, or SVG) with scannable QR codes for any exhibit or uploaded file, and track how many visitors view your items online or scan QR codes in the gallery (see Analytics).

6. Full data ownership in your own Google Cloud project

All exhibits, user accounts, and uploaded media files live inside your organisation's own Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Firebase project, giving your IT and information governance teams direct control over data residency, backups, and security (see Architecture and Requirements).