Image Annotation in the Hypothesis Web App

Who is this article for?

This article is for users of the Hypothesis web app who want to learn more about image annotation. If you are looking for information about Image Annotation for the Hypothesis LMS app, click here.

What is Image Annotation?

Image annotation lets Hypothesis users create area selections over documents and images when creating annotations. Image annotations allow users to create rectangular areas, or to create a pin, as a way of indicating the part of the document their annotation references. A thumbnail of the selection area (or the area around a pin) will appear on the annotation Card in the same place where the selected text for a text annotation typically appears.

Like text annotations, users can reply and link to image annotations.

Note: The initial release of the image annotation feature is limited to PDF documents only. Support for other document types will be added soon.

How to create an image annotation

1. Open the document that you would like to annotate in your browser.
2. Activate Hypothesis using the Chrome extension, Bookmarklet, or Via.
3. In the sidebar, click the Rectangle or Pin buttons to activate image annotation.
   
   
   • The rectangle selection – allows a user to choose a rectangular area in the document to annotate.
     
   • The pin selection– allows a user to annotate a particular point in the document.
     
4. Select an area or a point in the document that you would like to annotate. This will open the text editor in the annotation Card where you can write your annotation.
   Note: If the selected area includes any selectable text, that text will be used as the alt-text for the image thumbnail in the annotation card.
5. Once you’ve added text to your annotation, click Post.

Viewing Image Annotations

Once your image annotation is posted, it will display your comment along with a preview of the annotated image area.

Image Annotation Created from the Rectangle Selection Tool

When you use the rectangle tool, the annotation card will show the selected area along with your annotation.

Image Annotation Created from the Pin Annotation Tool

When you use the pin tool, the annotation card will show a pin and a preview of the area around it, along with your annotation.

Image annotations are shown in the sidebar alongside text annotations. If the sidebar is set to sort annotations by location, the image and text annotations will be sorted following these rules:

• Annotations are grouped by the page they appear on.
  
• On each page:
  • Text annotations appear first.
    
  • Image annotations follow text annotations.
  • Multiple image annotations are ordered based on their position from top to bottom on the page (the highest appears first).