TIFF metadata viewer

Where a TIFF keeps its pixel size

The viewer reports which of these it found. If none is present, set the scale yourself (the pixel size calculator explains how) before measuring.

Fields that can identify a patient or a lab

Whole-slide files often carry more than pixels: a photo of the glass label (barcode, case number, sometimes a name), a macro image of the whole slide, scan date and time, the scanner's serial number, the user name and the original file name. The tool lists those it finds in the main tags. Before sharing a slide outside your institution, remove them: see how to remove labels and patient data from slide images.

The same information from the command line

tiffinfo file.tif (libtiff) prints every directory; exiftool -a -G1 file.tif adds maker tags; in Python, tifffile.TiffFile(path) exposes .pages[i].tags, .ome_metadata and .imagej_metadata. For SVS, openslide.OpenSlide(path).properties gives the parsed fields (see reading SVS files in Python).

How it opens a file without uploading it

When you choose a file, the browser hands this page a handle to it on your disk. The page reads only the bytes it needs: the TIFF directory first, then the tiles for the part of the image on screen, and decodes them in the page with an open-source TIFF reader (geotiff). Nothing is sent to a server, so unpublished data and slides with patient labels stay on your computer, and multi-gigabyte slides open in seconds because they are never copied anywhere. Close the tab and the file is gone from the page.

The page loads its own scripts from slidescope.science and the site's privacy-respecting page-view counter; neither ever sees your image. Open-source licences: image-tools-vendor.LICENSE.txt.

Questions