Quick start

Getting started with NimbusImage right away

Starting with NimbusImage is easy—help is here!

At the top right is a help icon (?) and a chatbot icon. The help icon has user tours to guide you through basic tasks, and the chatbot can help you look at your images and come up with some analysis strategies, along with instructions for using NimbusImage.

Press tab anywhere in the interface to bring up a cheat sheet of commands and keyboard shortcuts.

Sign up

We strongly recommend you start by trying NimbusImage from an existing server like nimbusimage.com—no installation required! Just follow the sign up instructions. There are a number of plans on there to help support the ongoing development of NimbusImage, and a free tier that you can use for small datasets and occasional use.

Group plans are available for teams! First the administrator should sign up, then the administrator can invite others to the team plan. If you want to add existing members to your team, contact [e-mail].

Drop in your data into the file drop zone

You can drag and drop your data directly onto the drop zones to load it into NimbusImage; just follow the prompts.

• "Quick upload" works for most files and will automatically run the various steps using defaults.

• If you have a more complex file structure or need to do rearrange variables, click "Advanced upload".

View your data

The image viewer should be pretty intuitive to navigate. Press tab to reveal some keyboard shortcuts and features.

Find some objects

Click + next to "Toolset" to bring up a menu. You can customize your own interface!

For instance, makee a blob tool and draw some blobs like this:

Analyze those objects

Click "Measure objects" to measure, for instance, "Blob metrics":

Then click the play button to compute: And then use the "Object list" to find your new data:

Make a Snapshot

Use Snapshots to take a visual bookmark of your data to capture and document that perfect picture for your paper or talk.

Use Snapshots to take a visual bookmark of your data to capture and document that perfect picture for your paper or talk.

Export your data for analysis

Export your data to a CSV file, ready to import to Excel, R, Python, or whatever analysis tool you like!