The Horizon Europe iMagine project is devoted to developing and delivering imaging data and services for aquatic science. Started in September 2022, over 3 years the project will provide a portfolio of image data collections, high-performance image analysis tools empowered with Artificial Intelligence, and best practice documents for scientific image analysis. These services and documentation will enable better and more efficient processing and analysis of imaging data in marine and freshwater research, accelerating our scientific insights about processes and measures relevant to healthy oceans, seas, and coastal and inland waters. By building on the European Open Science Cloud compute platform, iMagine delivers a generic framework for AI model development, training, and deployment, which researchers can adopt for refining their AI-based applications for water pollution mitigation, biodiversity and ecosystem studies, climate change analysis and beach monitoring, but also for developing and optimising other AI-based applications in this field.