tiff multi-document files

[George Karabin <gkarabin pobox com>]

Scanning and fax applications sometimes store multiple images in a 
single image/tiff file. I'd like to modify eog to display multi-image 
tiff files as a flat collection of files, as if it were a directory. 
Right now it's ignoring the other images in the file.

I want to add a gnome-vfs module to map libtiff's directory feature to 
a gnome-vfs URI with archive-file-format-like methods. For each image 
file it opens, eog would test to see if it's image/tiff, and then try 
to open the directory. If the module's installed, then it'll get a 
directory handle and create the collection.

Does the idea sound OK in principle for eog? I'm not sure how much eog 
wants to know about file-format-specific stuff like this, so I'm asking 
up-front. I don't think it makes sense to handle these sorts of files 
in gdk - this doesn't really map well to the animation interface, and 
there wouldn't be enough developers using it to justify changing APIs. 
So if this is done, eog has to learn about this tiff idiosyncrasy.

Likewise, does this sound OK for gnome-vfs? I think there's less 
controversy here, but this is a fairly obscure use case. I can't 
imagine too many apps actually caring to use this, so I hope it's not 
considered bloat and a bad dependency.

- George