HOW TO: Embed Thumbnails for Multipage TIFFs Using Custom Tags

The TIFF specifications don't allow for embedded thumbnails for each page, but it is possible to use custom tags.  Therefore you could create the thumbnail image and save it as binary data into a tag in the TIFF.  The advantage with this is that you can load and display thumbnails much faster than you would if you were to first load each full size page and resize it.  Of course, since this is using custom tags only your application would be able to have this feature but if you are creating and reloading multipage TIFFs and displaying thumbnails it can speed up your application's image loading time by more than 15x.

Attached is a C# 2005 example using LEADTOOLS 16.5's .NET interface.  The following functions are used to accomplish this goal:

- RasterCodecs.GetInformation
- RasterCodecs.Load
- RasterCodecs.Save
- RasterImage.CreateThumbnail
- RasterImage.ReadTag
- RasterImage.WriteTag