Embed Thumbnail in Tiff

Is is possible to create thumbnails for a multipage tif and embed the thumbnails in the original tif?

LeadTools 14.5

Which LEADTOOLS interface (API, COM, etc.) are you using?

Could you send an example TIF image you want to embed thumbnails into?

Using .Net 2.0 libraries VS2008 - Tiff images from a scanner is what we will be using. Is is also possible to specify the size of the thumbnail say 75 pixels up to 120 pixels? Thanks

By "Tiff images from a scanner" are you saying that you're receiving images created directly from a scanner or are you using our TWAIN libraries to interface with the scanner and get the raw images and then save them to TIFF?  In other words, are you loading and modifying existing TIFF files or creating TIFF files from pages scanned in using TWAIN?

If you are loading and modifying existing TIFF files, please send an example file.

I have multiple scenarios.

I can receive the raw image, using LeadTools TWAIN interface. I save the raw image to disk and then create a thumbnail (using ColorResolutionCommand, SizeCommand). The performance is acceptable because the computer is much faster than the scanner.

The other scenario is we receive DVDs full of images that we must view. The thumbnail view is sufficient to verify the quality of the image. But it is very time consuming for the user to wait for the thumbnail to generate while the image is loading.

I would like to generate the thumbnail and embed it into the original image. This would avoid the time consuming process of generating the thumbnail in real time. This could be done as a preprocess job at night prior to the users ever seeing the images. I want to keep the thumbnail and original tiff together for simplicity.

Since the DVD of images are created by external clients. It could be any type of tiff image format.

Thanks

The TIFF specification doesn't have a thumbnail tag so it's not possible to make this work on a broad basis.  However, the TIFF specs do allow for "custom" or "private" tags which you could write the binary data of a thumbnail image into.  Of course, this would only be accessible by your application but that sounds like it would be acceptable.

To write a custom tag, you will need to check the TIFF specs to make sure you aren't writing to a tag number that's already defined (http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/tiff/index.html and http://www.awaresystems.be/imaging/tiff.html are good links).  Then you can do soemthing like this:

1. Make a copy of the image and resize to desired thumbnail size
2. Use RasterCodecs.Save to save the thumbnail image to a MemoryStream
3. Create a tag of type Byte (array of binary byte data) with the RasterTagMetaData class
4. Use RasterCodecs.WriteTag to write the RasterTagMetaData object to the file.

Then when you load the images back up, you can:
1. Read the tag with RasterCodecs.ReadTag
2. Create a MemoryStream object from the bytes within the RasterTagMetaData
3. Load the thumbnail image with RasterCodecs.Load using the MemoryStream

I've written a demo that shows how to embed the thumbnails within a custom TIFF tag: http://support.leadtools.com/SupportPortal/CS/forums/33298/ShowPost.aspx