Last modified: 2009-03-16 22:13:18 UTC
From #mediawiki in January: <GerardM-> Brion, why do we not support tiff files ? <GerardM-> this would make a big difference for the image restoration projects <brion> GerardM-: i think we haven't quite got round to it. tiffs are a bit complicated in that it's a meta-format with many possible actual encodings <brion> check if there's an extension for it already in the works and plop it on my queue to look at :) <GerardM-> it prevents the restorations to be taken seriously by people outside or WMF ... you can not repeat the work from compressed files <GerardM-> Brion, at the start of the fundraiser, localisation software was written for the banner .. <brion> yes, tiffs are great. :) i'm convinced -- just make sure that any existing extension or bug gets bumped and add me as CC I can't find a bug filed regarding TIFF support, so I've filed this one and CC'd Brion.
This would be particularly useful as the Library of Congress keeps the high quality original scans in tiff format, it would be great to not have to convert them to jpg, or downsample them below 12.5 megapixel for png.
Adding basic support for uploading TIFFs *without* inline rendering should be pretty easy, and sufficient for current needs (very large, high-quality source files, which will have smaller versions uploaded for online use). Will want to test/confirm offline that file type verification is good before switching the config switch though.
(In reply to comment #2) > Adding basic support for uploading TIFFs *without* inline rendering should be > pretty easy, and sufficient for current needs (very large, high-quality source > files, which will have smaller versions uploaded for online use). Yes, one would think that uploading smaller versions for viewing would be sensible. That is not a view shared by everyone, however: http://durova.blogspot.com/2009/02/failure-to-thumbnail.html
We could use something like VIPS http://www.vips.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ to render out thumbnails for very large images (including TIFFs) without loading the whole image into memory. Also I highly recommend we send out the http "attachment" header when passing links to those high res images. They crash most systems/browsers. So we should only let people "download" the image. ( Instead of linking for in-browser display. ) Not everyone intuitively will know to right click on the image to save target as.
also see command line usage cpu / memory / speed comparisons: http://www.vips.ecs.soton.ac.uk/index.php?title=Speed_and_Memory_Use
Set on test & commons with currently no native thumb support. Threw together some quick experimental support in r48462 -- once synced this will allow the image width/height to be recorded properly and exif metadata shown, and optionally thumbnailing for images not exceeding the max image size for thumbing.
