Spaced Out ::

BigTIFF appears to be coming close to an official release. TIFF has been a popular format within geospatial circles for a while because its an open format (although Adobe owns the specification) and there is the open source libtiff library used for reading/writing TIFFs. It’s also incredibly extensible and has proved the test of time when it comes to image processing. . The problem for the geospatial industry?? File size is currently restricted to 4Gb. This might have seemed gargantuan 5 years ago but there are now many libraries of images which are easily bigger than this. So the BigTIFF project was formed which garnered industry financing to support the extension of libtiff to break the 4Gb barrier. ESRI and Leica are amongst the industry support and its a cheap way for them to get an extended TIFF format.

So where can you use BigTIFF? Well as far as I’m aware Ossim is the first to support it (at least in the geospatial arena). So if you haven’t tried Ossim, now’s a good time.