tiffmakemosaic - splits one or more TIFF file into mosaic(s) (set(s)

       Christophe Deroulers

LargeTIFFTools 1.4.2                           February 23rd, 2025                             tiffmakemosaic(1)

       tiffmakemosaic takes one or more single-image TIFF files and creates, for each one of these, a mosaic (if
       needed).  A mosaic is a set of TIFF files that would reproduce the original image if glued together (e.g.
       with ImageMagick or GraphicsMagick's montage command). Unless an explicit  dimension  is  requested,  all
       pieces  of  a mosaic have the same width and length and these dimensions are submultiples of the original
       image's dimensions. They are chosen so that each piece of the  mosaic  is  smaller  than  a  given  size.
       Therefore, even if the original image is huge and wouldn't fit into the computer's memory, which prevents
       it to be opened by most software, the pieces will be small enough to be opened easily.

       A mosaic is produced as soon as the full provided image doesn't meet the requirements of needed memory to
       open (option -M below), width, or size (option -g below).

       If  requested, it will add some overlap to the adjacent pieces (either of a fixed amount of pixels, or of
       a percentage of the pieces' width resp.  length, will appear  on  two  pieces  if  they  share  a  common
       border).

       The  names  given  to  the  output files that contain the pieces are created by adding the row and column
       numbers of the piece after the name of the original image and before the extension.

         tiffmakemosaic - splits one or more TIFF file into mosaic(s) (set(s)
       of TIFF or JPEG files smaller than a chosen size that would reproduce
       the original file if glued together)

-v     Verbose monitoring.

       -T     Do not report TIFF errors or warnings. Under Windows, they are reported with noisy dialog boxes.

       -M<sizeinMiB>
              Dimensions of the pieces of each mosaic will be computed so that no more than the specified amount
              of memory will be required to open one of them. Defaults to 1024 MiB = 1 GiB = 1073741824 bytes. A
              value  of zero means no limit on the dimensions to achieve a goal of memory requirement (but there
              may be other limits, e.g. the installed memory in the computer during production of the mosaic).

       -m[widthdivisorinpixels]x[lengthdivisorinpixels]
              If either dimension is provided, the pieces of the  mosaic  will  be  integer  multiples  of  this
              dimension.  If  a  divisor  is  zero  or  is  not  provided,  this option adds no constrain on the
              corresponding piece dimension.

              For instance, -m 8x0 will require that the width of the pieces be a multiple of 8 pixels.

       -g[widthinpixels]x[lengthinpixels]
              If either dimension is provided, the pieces  of  the  mosaic  will  have  exactly  this  dimension
              (ignoring  the  -m  option  if present), except perhaps for the last piece of each row or the last
              piece of each column if the dimension is not an exact divisor of the  corresponding  dimension  of
              the  full  image. If a dimension is zero or is not provided, it is replaced with the largest value
              which is compatible with the memory limit (option -M) and divides  the  corresponding  full  image
              dimension by a power of two.

              For  example,  -M 2048 -g x200 will require pieces of length exactly 200 pixels (but the pieces in
              the last row at the bottom of the image may be shorter) and width equal to W/2^n where  W  is  the
              width  of the full image and 2^n is the largest integer power of 2 such that a piece of size W/2^n
              x 200 pixels requires less than 2048 MiB of memory to open.

       -O<numberofpixels|fraction%>
              The adjacent pieces will overlap by that amount: if the border of a piece is not on a outer border
              of the full image, then the piece will be extended in the corresponding direction by the requested
              amount. If the amount is given in percent (a decimal number between 0 and 100  included,  followed
              by the `%' symbol), the overlap amount will be the corresponding fraction of the piece's width (if
              overlapping  across  a  vertical border) resp. length (horizontal border). Horizontal and vertical
              overlaps can be different. If the amount is given as a number of pixels  (must  be  a  nonnegative
              decimal  integer number), the overlap amount will be the specified amount, disregarding the actual
              dimensions of the pieces. However, the overlap will be truncated down to  a  piece's  width  resp.
              length if it would be larger.

              By default, produced mosaics have no overlap.

       -P[X][Y]#[,#...]

              If  necessary,  pad  image  before  making the mosaic, in direction x and/or y (default: both), to
              satisfy -M, -m or -g requirements. For instance, so that width is a multiple of larger a power  of
              2. Padding consists in adding to the right and/or to the bottom of the image pixels of value # (if
              1  sample/pixel) or #,# (if 2 samples per pixels), and so on. M for # means maximum possible value
              (e.g. 255 for 8-bit images).

       -j[#]  Requests output of JPEG files rather than the default TIFF. Optional number # in the  range  0  to
              100 indicates wanted JPEG quality (default is 75).

               If several of -j and -c options are given, only the last one takes effect.

       -c<method>[:opt[:opt]...]
              Requests  output  of  TIFF  files compressed with method. Method can be `none' for no compression,
              `jpeg', `lzw', `zip'... as provided by the LibTIFF library (see libtiff (3TIFF)). By default,  the
              same compression as in the input TIFF file is used.

               Method-specific details of the wished compression can be specified by adding one or several group
              of characters starting with a colon `:' after the methods's name, as follows.

              JPEG method:
               :# set compression quality level as in option -j (see above).

              LZW, Deflate (zip) and LZMA2 options:
               :# set predictor value
               :p# set compression level.

              For  example,  -c  lzw:2  to  get  LZW-encoded  data with horizontal differencing, -c zip:3:p9 for
              Deflate encoding with maximum compression level and floating point  predictor,  -c  jpeg:r:50  for
              JPEG-encoded RGB data at quality 50%.

               If several of -j and -c options are given, only the last one takes effect.

       In principle, generating pieces from a large TIFF file can  also  be  achieved  with  several  tools,  as
       tiffcrop,  ImageMagick and GraphicsMagick (one has to first compute and specify explicitly the dimensions
       and positions of the pieces, though). However, most of the programs start with  opening  and  deciphering
       the  whole  image  either in memory or in a huge temporary file on the disk, which makes them quite slow,
       and often unable to complete the task by lack of memory.

       In contrast, tiffmakemosaic  avoids  opening  the  whole  image,  which  yields  speedup  and  guarantees
       successful  termination  of  the process even on computers with modest memory. Eg. to make a mosaic of 64
       JPEG files requesting less than 512 MiB of memory to open from a RGB image of 103168x63232 pixels,  on  a
       computer with 16 GiB of RAM and an i5 CPU, tiffmakemosaic needs 2.5 minutes while GraphicsMagick needs 70
       minutes.

tiffsplittiles(1),tifffastcrop(1),tiffsplit(1),tiffcrop(1),libtiff(3TIFF)

       HomePage
       https://pperso.ijclab.in2p3.fr/page_perso/Deroulers/software/largetifftools/

         tiffmakemosaic [options] file1.tif [file2.tif...]