Despite the importance of imaging in biological and medical research, a large body of informative and precious image data never sees the light of day. To ensure scientific rigor as well as the reuse of data for scientific discovery, image data need to be made FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable). Image data experts are working together globally to agree on common data formats, metadata, ontologies and supporting tools toward image data FAIRification. With this Perspective, we call on public funders to join these efforts to support their national scientists. What researchers most urgently need are openly accessible resources for image data storage that are operated under long-term commitments by their funders. Although existing resources in Australia, Japan and Europe are already collaborating to enable global image data sharing, these efforts will fall short unless more countries invest in operating and federating their own open data resources. This will allow us to harvest the enormous potential of existing image data, preventing substantial loss of unrealized value from past investments in imaging acquisition infrastructure.

© 2025. European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Broad Institute, Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research and the Authors. Parts of this work were authored by US Federal Government authors and are not under copyright protection in the US; foreign copyright protection may apply.