ImageJ community members are often available via a couple of different chat services.
HOWEVER: It is often better to use the Image.sc Forum, rather than chat rooms, because:
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Conversations in chat will be less discoverable later than those on the Image.sc Forum. The forum is a vital resource for the community, providing a searchable history of questions and solutions. Have you ever found the answer to a question on forum.image.sc? Now suppose that that discussion had happened in chat instead—would you have found that answer?
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Most of the ImageJ community’s image analysis experts monitor the Image.sc Forum, not live chat rooms. The contract of the community is:
Experts give their time for free—but in exchange, that help is public, so that others may also benefit long into the future.
Here is a guide for when to use the Image.sc Forum versus chat services:
| Situation | Resource to use |
|---|---|
| I want to report a bug in the software. | See Reporting Issues |
| I need help analyzing my images. | Image.sc Forum, Image Analysis category |
| I need help managing my image data. | Image.sc Forum, Data Management category |
| I need help using the software tools. | Image.sc Forum, Usage & Issues category |
| I need help programming with the software tools. | Image.sc Forum, Development category |
| I want to discuss the ImageJ wiki (this website). | Image.sc Forum, Websites category |
| I have an announcement for the community. | Image.sc Forum, Announcements category |
| I have a job opening to advertise in the field. | Image.sc Forum, Job Opportunities category |
| Posting on the Image.sc Forum is too scary! | We try our best to be friendly! But if you are allergic to forums, and only chat sustains you, then go ahead and post on Zulip. |
| My topic is something less important to preserve as part of the community knowledge base: e.g. day-to-day project logistics, or time-sensitive discussion that will become less relevant after the fact. | Image.sc Zulip instance |
Zulip
Zulip is an open-source alternative to Slack and similar tools. It is a nice way to discuss things with the ImageJ community in real time.
Several ImageJ-related projects have channels on the Image.sc Zulip instance:
| Logo | Project | Channel |
|---|---|---|
 |
ImageJ wiki (this website) | #imagej.net |
|
ImageJ2 | #ImageJ2 |
 |
Fiji | #Fiji |
 |
ImgLib2 | #ImgLib2 |
 |
SCIFIO | #SCIFIO |
 |
SciJava | #SciJava |
| 3D ImageJ Suite | #3D Suite |
Gitter
The Gitter chat service is how developers of SciJava-based software have been discussing day-to-day issues for the past several years. You can participate, too: all you need is either a GitHub or Twitter account. Advantages of Gitter (compared to IRC) include a nice “21st century” web interface, email notification when participants miss messages, and a full searchable history. But it seems the community is trending more toward Zulip (see above), so it is not clear for how much longer the Gitter rooms will stay active.
| Logo | Project | Chat rooms |
|---|---|---|
|
ImageJ2 | imagej |
|
Fiji | fiji |
 |
KNIME | knime-ip |
|
ImgLib2 | imglib |
|
SCIFIO | scifio |
|
SciJava | scijava |
IRC
Long ago, some community members frequented IRC on irc.freenode.net, in the following chat rooms:
| Channel | Description |
|---|---|
#imagejdev |
Core ImageJ2 development discussion. |
#fiji-devel |
Fiji user and developer discussion and questions. |
Advantages of IRC include anonymity, and maximum compatibility with a huge variety of existing chat clients.
But active core developers of ImageJ-related projects have not monitored these rooms for many years, and since the Freenode “hostile takeover” of 2021, the rooms might not even exist anymore.
Chat logs from these channels can be downloaded from here.