Is there a way to delete select frames from a tiff file?

I want to delete select frames from a tiff file, but I do not want to rewrite an entire new file because it would take too long (I'm working with ~200-300 frames in one file, trying to take out around 3-10 frames). Is there an easy way to do this?

Answer 1

[Sean de Wolski]

Short Answer, No.

Why do you want to delete the frames?

Long Answer: A few options

MATLAB does give you access to LibTiff, via the Tiff class.

The methods for that don't show a "delete"-like thing. You might be able to get away without rewriting everything by first calculating which frames will be where after deletion and then moving only the ones that need to move once.

Alternatively, you could just set all of the values in the select frames to 0 and then skip them in your processing step, this won't help with file size but could help with processing. Then again it sounds like you're only talking about a few percent of the file size anyway so why worry.

Another approach might be to write a function or class that knows the deleted frames and accounts for them in the offset. Then you could read the file in and it could skip those frames knowing that they're "deleted" and mask this from the user.