1998.03.11 06:12 "Re: Tiff problems", by Rainer Wiesenfarth

I 'm trying to save a huge RGB file into the Tiff uncompressed striped format. All works perfectly until tiff a file size is less than 2 GB. The moment it comes to files More than 2 GB size tifflib function refuses to open it. I would like to know are there any limitations in the size of a tiff file in the tifflib or may be it is a Problem of the NT file system. A file I'm trying to generate is 90000 pix in line and 56000 lines.

The 2 GB limitation does not come from libtiff or the TIFF standard, but from the underlying operating system calls used for positioning inside the file. This holds for both Unix and NT. The system calls used are the seek calls with parameters limited to signed 32 bit.

I think there are possibilities to overcome at least the 2 GB limitation by implementing an own seek method capable of using 64 bit parameters (Unix, at least Irix, provides these calls). Nevertheless you will then be limited (at 4 GB) by the TIFF standard which specifies unsigned 32 bit for offsets in TIFF files.

The easiest way to avoid this problem is compression (e.g. JPEG).

Greetings Rainer