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PyLibTiff is a package that provides a wrapper to the libtiff library to Python using ctypes and a pure Python module for reading and writing TIFF and LSM files.

PyLibTiff is a package that provides:

* a wrapper to the libtiff library to Python using ctypes.
* a pure Python module for reading and writing TIFF and LSM files. The images are read as numpy.memmap objects so that it is possible to open images that otherwise would not fit to computers RAM.

There exists many Python packages such as PIL, FreeImagePy that support reading and writing TIFF files. The PyLibTiff project was started to have an efficient and direct way to read and write TIFF files using the libtiff library without the need to install any unnecessary packages or libraries. The pure Python module was created for reading "broken" TIFF files such as LSM files that in some places use different interpretation of TIFF tags than what specified in the TIFF specification document. The libtiff library would just fail reading such files. In addition, the pure Python module is more memory efficient as the arrays are returned as memory maps. Support for compressed files is not implemented yet.