Add BigTIFF support to GIMP-2.10
Here is another person wanting BigTIFF support in GIMP-2.10, or rather I assume they are using GIMP-2.10:
https://groups.google.com/g/hugin-ptx/c/LQG34H2SuDo/m/CFuXRyC0BAAJ
Quoting, "The result is a Tiff image of 9.2GB. The mosaic looks good and the blend went fine. It can be opened in Gimp. However I have yet to solve how to export it again, as Gimp seems to suffer from its own limitations in relation to Bigtiff files.".
Right now anyone opening a tiff larger than 4.0GB with GIMP-2.10 receives no warning, but looses data if they export over the original tiff. Which at least for Hugin-generated tiffs is a logical thing to do: The tiff produced by Hugin has a lot of empty space around the image that can be cropped away using GIMP's "Crop to Content", but the resulting image still can be, usually is, larger than 4GB.
Exporting from GIMP to replace the original Hugin-saved tif (which is how I discovered GIMP's BigTIFF problem) seems like the natural, normal, correct, obvious thing to do, but unfortunately in reality is a quick way to corrupt a file produced by a lot of user effort and computer/cpu time.
GIMP-2.99 has BigTIFF support (#7956 (closed)).
Considering:
- How long it might be before GIMP-2.99 is ready to be released as GIMP 3.0
- How many people are currently using GIMP-2.10 and will be for some time to come
- The very real potential for corrupting a user's hard work that they produced using other software. . .
The nice and right thing to do is to add full BigTIFF support to GIMP-2.10.