Hi,

I cannot open large (30 megabytes) .tif or .png images with inkscape. When trying to do so inkscape gives an error, "Failed to load the requested file". So I'm asking whether this is just a limitatation of inkscape or is there a way to get inkscape to open large image files.

The reason I need to open them is that I'm drawing vector objects on them and most importantly I need the final image as a pdf with defined physical dimensions and I haven't discovered another free program that could define the dimensions without downsizing the resolution.

EDIT: The resolution of the images I'm trying to open is in the range of 20000x20000

well 20000*20000 is 400 million pixels, and neglecting transparency, with each having to hold 3 bytes (rgb) after decompression (so already we need, after any intermediate data structures to recover the original bitmap from tif/png compression, at least 1.2 gb of memory), it would appear you're asking for a lot more resources than the compressed file size suggests.

Is there no way to chop it whilst you create your vector objects?

Hi.

Inkscape is lacking the right control over the right harwares in general.
It cannot use the benefits of a gpu and there is no 64bit version.
I have not much knowledge on that, my experience is that it can crush with images half the size.

Maybe you can try the development build, which has an improved renderer (?) -what I see is that the devbuild uses interpolated rendering of raster images, and not the original pixelated one.

You can try to import the image without embedding it to the svg, that may work.