Digital slides · free · no microscope needed
X-WOW Slide Library
An ant, a mosquito wing, pollen, a fish gill, a slice of tomato: 13 classic biology slides, scanned edge to edge so you can zoom from the whole slide down to single cells on a phone or a laptop. It exists, and it is very nice.
Why it exists
For students without a microscope
X-WOW wanted students who have no microscope to be able to look at real slides. In 2019 it set out to do that for a group of students in Nigeria.
The first attempt failed. Whole-slide images were shared, but the viewer needed a far more powerful computer than the students had. About five months later, a viewer that runs in any web browser solved it: the whole collection went online, readable on any device.
Credit
A. M. F., then a microbiology student in Abuja: the reason this exists. As the old site put it, without that help none of this would have happened. The same student went on to found the X-WOW Kids Science Club. (Credited by initials: X-WOW names no private person without their permission.)
Scans: made by X-WOW, 2018–2019.
Hosting: EasyZoom, a zoomable-image service.
The collection · 13 slides links live when an AI checked them, 9 Oct 2026
Pick a slide and zoom
Each link opens the full scan in your browser: pinch or scroll to zoom from the whole slide down to single cells. Sizes are the full-resolution image in pixels, read from the image host.
Uploaded to the image host between 2018-12-17 and 2019-07-24. Together: about 3.0 billion pixels.
The largest image in the library is the ant, at 646 megapixels.
Where the slides live
Off the old site, still online
The scans were never stored on the old website. They sit on EasyZoom under the X-WOW account, and the old pages only framed them, which is why they survive the move to this site. The one dependency left is that account: if it ever closes, these links stop working.
Want slides like these for your own class? A microscope with a camera and stitching software can make them; the Slide Scanner page says who makes such software now.
32 more slides from X-WOW's own box, CC0 and served from x-wow.com itself, are in the game SHRINK.