What software works well for viewing massive TIFF images on Windows 7?
I have tested VLIV (the Very Large Image Viewer) with the moon image and it works flawlessly on my Windows 7 32-bit machine with 2 GB RAM.
First, let me give some info on this program:
- Vliv is a Windows application that allows interactive viewing of gigantic TIFF images.
- Vliv is known to have successfully displayed a 121,600 x 97,280 image.
Applications:
- The most obvious application is geospatial imagery.
- Computer generated images such as fractals or raytraced images can be calculated with very large dimensions and interactively displayed.
- Full size photomosaics.
The only seeming downside is it's a shareware; but that's not a problem because you can use it without any time & viewing limitations.
Limitations: It only displays a message above each tile (in fact, I couldn't see it while testing the moon image), and printing and exporting are disabled.
You can visit the home page of the program to read the full information. Here is the download link to the setup file (only 244 KB).
And finally, the proof (esp. for @Ivo Flipse):
I'd put my bet on IrfanView - it's probably one of the better & lighter image viewers.
You can also try FastPictureViewer - I haven't tried it personally but it claims to have DirectX hardware acceleration.
(via product description: )
- Integration with Windows 7 (Taskbar Jump List) and Windows Vista (thumbnail cache, "Browse with..." shell folder extension). Enables Explorer thumbnails.
- Native 64-bit and 32-bit editions for Windows 7, Vista, XP SP3 and XP64, multi-core and multi-processor enabled to take full advantage of modern computer hardware, with optional Direct3D GPU acceleration
Finally I've found a program that can view very large tiff images. It's called FWTools http://fwtools.maptools.org/
It can zoom in and out, export it, and make some modifications on it. And It's free. Even though It's not supposed to be an image viewer (It's a map tool) it works very well.
It opens the image almost instantaneously. It proves that loading all the image on the memory is not the way to proceed. You just need a program properly writen that only loads what it needs every moment: more detail of some areas if you zoom in, or less detailed view of the whole image.
(VLIV is also fast but doesn't allow you to zoom in/out nor make anything with the image. I contacted it's programmer and he told me that we need first to transfor the image to pyramidal format, but free windows tools don't make it well and are really slow.)