Is that even possible? I once tried to make a matched pyramid (JPEG-in-)TIFF reader/writer pair and to retain some compatibility with other people who do this s

Is that even possible? I once tried to make a matched pyramid (JPEG-in-)TIFF reader/writer pair and to retain some compatibility with other people who do this sort of thing (GIS, medical images, etc.). Virtually nobody agrees on how you’re supposed to do it[1]: some prescribe storing smaller versions as siblings (a NextIFD chain started by the main image), some as children of the largest one (a NextIFD chain pointed to by the SubIFD link of the main image), some as children each other (a SubIFD chain started by the main image), some as both simultaneously (a chain of identical SubIFD and NextIFD fields started by the main image). And I mean, I could decide on something for my writer. But now I’m a reader and I get a TIFF file with some IFDs somehow linked by the NextIFD and/or SubIFD fields. WTF am I supposed to do with it? Is it a pyramid? Is it a multipage document? Is it a birdplane^W a sequence of pyramidal pages? I suppose I can walk the whole thing and construct a DAG, but again, how the hell can I tell what the DAG means? (And don’t take this as a knock against TIFF in general—as far as I know, it’s one of the few image formats that takes the possibility of large and larger-than-memory images seriously. I think HEIF also does? But ISO paywalled it after first making it publicly available, so, hard pass.) [1] Here’s a writeup that comes to similar conclusions: https://dpb587.me/entries/tiff-ifd-and-subifd-20240226 https://dpb587.me/entries/tiff-ifd-and-subifd-20240226