Biological imaging is one of the primary tools by which we understand living systems across scales from atoms to organisms. Rapid advances in imaging technology have increased both the spatial and temporal resolutions at which we examine those systems, as well as enabling visualisation of larger tissue volumes. These advances have huge potential but also generate ever increasing amounts of imaging data that must be stored and analysed. Public image repositories provide a critical scientific service through open data provision, supporting reproducibility of scientific results, access to reference imaging datasets and reuse of data for new scientific discovery and acceleration of image analysis methods development. The scale and scope of imaging data provides both challenges and opportunities for open sharing of image data. In this article, we provide a perspective influenced by decades of provision of open data resources for biological information, suggesting areas to focus on and a path towards global interoperability.

生物成像是我们了解从原子到生物体各个尺度的生命系统的主要工具之一。成像技术的快速进步提高了我们检查这些系统的空间和时间分辨率，并实现了更大组织体积的可视化。这些进步具有巨大的潜力，但也产生了越来越多的必须存储和分析的成像数据。公共图像存储库通过开放数据提供关键的科学服务，支持科学结果的可重复性、参考成像数据集的访问以及数据的重用以实现新的科学发现和加速图像分析方法的开发。成像数据的规模和范围为图像数据的开放共享提供了挑战和机遇。在本文中，我们提供了受几十年来生物信息开放数据资源提供影响的观点，提出了需要重点关注的领域以及实现全球互操作性的路径。