PYTHON IMAGES

Creating BigTiff Files

Generate your own sample files

Photo by Olga Subach on Unsplash

Purpose: Create sample BigTiff files

Last Update: January 26, 2021

A note from the Author

As I scoped the web for BigTiff images, I was not able to find any. Particularly, I needed +20 GB image to test an compression tool. Of course no one is crazy enough to host images that large and if they do it will be a minute before you can download them. Here is a simple solution to this problem.

Install the Dependencies

I will advise that you create an virtual environment and then run the following pip command:

pip install tifffile

Yup, we are done here.

Generating a 30 GB BigTiff File

To generate a 30GB BigTiff file run the following script.

import numpy
import tifffile as tiff
data = numpy.random.randint(0, 255, (100000, 100000, 3), 'uint8')
tiff.imwrite('temp.tif', data, bigtiff=True, photometric='rgb')

I would like to note that I ran this on a M1 Mac Mini with 8GB of RAM. Of course, my M1 Mac Mini can’t handle load 30 GB of data in the RAM so instead it uses the SSD to swap most of the contents of data variable. The script takes about 5 minutes to execute.

To generate smaller/large BigTiff files, you should change the dimensions of the data variable. If I recall correctly, a 50000 by 50000 generates an 8GB BigTiff.