[ITK-users] Big tiff file

[Matt McCormick]

Thanks for the follow-up, Gib.

On Sat, Oct 21, 2017 at 8:39 PM, Gib Bogle <g.bogle at auckland.ac.nz> wrote:
> 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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>>
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