Hello all,
I am working with very large files >4gb and darktable does not have a problem importing them. Exporting however leads to problems. I get errors saying that the tiff file is too large. I am on a macos. I don’t know how to test if my libtiff accepts bigtiff formats or if i need to pass a flag to darktable.
Any help is appreciated
How much memory do you have? It sounds like not enough
Welcome!
I don’t think BigTIFF is supported for export currently. Even if libtiff could support it in theory (most modern versions since 4.0 seem to do) and that could be an additional export parameter in the future (or even auto detected from the size of the image), dt relies on exiv2 to add metadata, and exiv2 doesn’t currently work on BigTIFF files. So while export could maybe be added to dt (please feel free to open a future request on GitHub), it could not immediately have identical functionality as the current TIFF export (i.e. wouldn’t be as feature complete, so that’s probably why it hasn’t been done yet).
64GB of ram with 256GB swap. I am hitting some swap but thats not the issue. There is a limit of 4gb for a tiff image.
802.9962 [tiff_open] error: TIFFAppendToStrip: Maximum TIFF file size exceeded
802.9984 [tiff_open] error: TIFFWriteDirectoryTagData: Maximum TIFF file size exceeded
805.0866 [imageio_storage_disk] could not export to file: `/Users/ben/Pictures/darktable_exported/img20260302_20561413_01.tif’!
The fix seems to be to use BigTiff. The terrible google ai said that darktable may support it but it doesn’t seem to.
Ah! Now that is interesting. I am looking to print out 16x20 images on a printer. I don’t necessarily need an export. I read that it’s almost always better to export the image rather than print directly from dark table. Alternatively, I would want a lossless image format. I don’t expect to do anything much beyond what dark table can do in an application like Gimp. I’m mostly just correcting exposures and maybe increasing some contrast here and there. What image format would you recommend that maybe doesn’t have this 4gb file limitation that darktable supports?
Have you perhaps thought about your goal from the other end: what is the viewing distance for your 16×20 print, and what ppi does that entail? Does the answer tell you a >680MPix image is absolutely required? (250MPix really because of other constraints, but still…)
Im planning on having a printer that can handle 1440 dpi. 4800dpi from my 8x10 will have very little or no interpolation after cropping it and printing a 16x20. I dont have a dark room but im trying to replicate that experience and maybe improve it.
Normally I would use a lossless raster format for images. I am used to tiff and ive had excellent experiences with it in the past. I may try avif.
Im trying to maximize the equipment I have. I shoot on an 8x10, i use very slow film for little to no grain, i scan the negative with 4800dpi, and I would love to have a way to print the positives. I realize I may be an edge case but so far darktable is able to do what I want. Its very impressive. The fact my uncompressed png is 10gb and works fine shows that this is a very impressive tool. The 4gb file limitation is an ancient relic at this point, especially if you want to talk about even a 50mp picture with layers or if I watched to stich together a panorama but its also a relic that still pops up every now and then
Lossless jxl could be another option.