Dear luggers,

I have few scanned images, most of which are in jpeg format, but some of them are in tiff format. The problem I am facing is with images stored in tiff format. (I have a P4 1.7 cpu, with 256 MB DDR memory using Intel mother board 845GB and Nvidia Riva TNT2 display card.)

Coming to the problem, while trying to view tiff files the system goes into spin. First of all the system memory gets completely used up. The system starts using swap memory to the extent of 200+ MB (I have 500+ MB swap partition). The system starts lot of disk i/o and even after almost 2-3 mins, there is no display of the tiff file. I tried with some of the small tiff files I have (around 15 images total), but with all the files I saw the same problem. The smallest tiff file size is around 150 KB. I have around 4-5 images around that size, and the rest are more then 1 MB. I didn't have the heart to try to view the bigger ones. These same files I am able to view in Windows without any stress on the CPU or memory.

I tried using different viewer softwares to check out if there was any problem with any specific software. I tried "Eye for Gnome", "Qview", KDE's default viewer "Kview", and also "Kuickshow". I switched on the KSystem Guard to find out what happens. I found that the moment I clicked on any of the tiff files, the system memory gets used up to the maximum and the system starts lot of swap activity. Then I killed the image viewer process and I got a system message given some details about imlib. I couldn't understand much and there was not much detail in it. It was probably because I killed the viewer process while it was trying to display the image.

I presume that there is some problem with some graphic library (imlib?) which the image viewer software(s) is/are trying to use to display tiff images.

Okay, one more thing, I tried this with both Red Hat Linux 9.0 and with SuSE 8.2, but with same results. (BTW, I must say SuSE Linux is quite impressive then any other distribution that I have used till date. I have been using Red Hat since its version 5.2, and have used Mandrake 8.2, 9.1.)

One more interesting aspect about this is that I tried viewing these files using a Windows based software called "Irfan View" using Wine. And to my surprise I could view the tiff file without much problem, albiet a bit slow then in Windows, but no swapping nor eating up memory.

Any Pointers?

Rajen.