Community

The option to disable the creation of a BigTIFF

991
0
10-14-2014 06:25 AM
Status: Open
JackHardy
by Esri Contributor
Esri Contributor
Occasionally when copying large rasters using the Copy Raster tool in ArcGIS 10.x, the TIFF image produced is in BigTIFF format.

Unfortunately lots of applications dont accept BigTIFF images (including ArcGIS 9.3.1).

Can we please have an option for disabling the creation of BigTIFF and report an error if the size exceed the 4 GiB limit of a classic TIFF.

In the GDAL API there are 4 options:
 
BIGTIFF=YES/NO/IF_NEEDED/IF_SAFER: Control whether the created file is a BigTIFF or a classic TIFF.
  • YES forces BigTIFF.
  • NO forces classic TIFF.
  • IF_NEEDED will only create a BigTIFF if it is clearly needed (uncompressed, and image larger than 4GB).
  • IF_SAFER will create BigTIFF if the resulting file *might* exceed 4GB.
BigTIFF is a TIFF variant which can contain more than 4GiB of data (size of classic TIFF is limited by that value). This option is available if GDAL is built with libtiff library version 4.0 or higher (which is the case of the internal libtiff version from GDAL >= 1.5.0). The default is IF_NEEDED. (IF_NEEDED and IF_SAFER are available from GDAL 1.6.0).
 
When creating a new GeoTIFF with no compression, GDAL computes in advance the size of the resulting file. If that computed file size is over 4GiB, GDAL will automatically decide to create a BigTIFF file. However, when compression is used, it is not possible in advance to known the final size of the file, so classical TIFF will be chosen. In that case, the user must explicitly require the creation of a BigTIFF with BIGTIFF=YES if he anticipates the final file to be too big for classical TIFF format. If BigTIFF creation is not explicitly asked or guessed and the resulting file is too big for classical TIFF, libtiff will fail with an error message like "TIFFAppendToStrip:Maximum TIFF file size exceeded".