Tag Archives: BigTIFF

TIFF is a very popular image format, but it can’t handle really huge files. “Really huge” means files bigger than 4 gigabytes, or more precisely, files in which any data offset can’t be represented in 32 bits. That’s not a limitation that comes up often, but some applications, such as medical scans, need enough detail to push the limit.

A dozen years ago, members of the TIFF community at AWare Systems came up with a simple idea: Create a variant of TIFF with 64-bit offsets instead of 32 bits. The result was BigTIFF.
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