[ITK-users] Big tiff file

[Gib Bogle]

I've managed to find the answer to one of my questions, by looking at the file header values.  A TIFF file less than 2GB has these 4 header bytes:
49 49 2A 00
and over 2GB (BigTIFF) has
49 49 2B 00
ITK handles this automatically.

I can view the big TIFFs with Fiji (ImageJ), so this is not a bad option for displaying the slices.  What I like about Irfanview is that it's very light-weight.  ImageJ loads the whole file into memory, which can take some time, while Irfanview loads one slice at a time.

I am not keen about Slicer - it is a real heavy-weight - and Tomviz is very specialised, designed for viewing tomography data, i.e. images in a tilt series.
________________________________________
From: Matt McCormick <matt.mccormick at kitware.com>
Sent: Sunday, 22 October 2017 4:48 a.m.
To: Dženan Zukić
Cc: Gib Bogle; Insight-users
Subject: Re: [ITK-users] Big tiff file

Hi,

Since ITKv4, support for "BigTiff" was added, so ITK can support TIFF
files larger than 4GB.

One possible limitation may be the filesystem -- avoid FAT32 formatted
filesystem that will run into size limits.

The file could be viewed with a number of ITK-supported viewers, e.g.

- 3D-Slicer: https://www.slicer.org/
- ITK-SNAP: http://www.itksnap.org/
- Tomviz: http://www.tomviz.org/

HTH,
Matt

On Sat, Oct 21, 2017 at 11:40 AM, Dženan Zukić <dzenanz at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Gib,
>
> TIFF is limited to 4GiB. Unless you must use TIFF, better switch to
> MetaImage or NRRD.
>
> Regards,
> Dženan
>
> On Sat, Oct 21, 2017 at 12:08 AM, Gib Bogle <g.bogle at auckland.ac.nz> wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>>
>> I am joining a stack of 2D tiffs into a 3D tiff, and have run into a
>> problem with big files.  When the uncompressed size of the 3D file is more
>> than 2GB I get an error when I try to view it with Irfanview.  At first I
>> thought maybe I needed to upgrade from ITK4.8.0, but after installing and
>> using ITK4.12.2 I see that I have the same issue.  Irfanview says:
>>
>> "Invalid or unsupported TIF file"
>>
>> I now suspect that the problem is not ITK-related, rather it is a
>> limitation of Irfanview.
>>
>> I have two questions:
>>
>>
>> Is there a limit on the allowed size of a tiff file?
>>
>> Is there another program (preferably free) that can open for viewing tiff
>> files bigger than 2GB?
>>
>>
>> It is useful but not essential for me to be able to view these big 3D
>> files.  I will use ITK functions to process the 3D files, and I'm assuming
>> that any file that ITK can create it can also read.
>>
>>
>> Thanks
>>
>> Gib
>>
>>
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