[Suggestion] TIFF Viewer support

[mburtin]

As you know, I work in academic health research, and I now use Positron daily. In academia, the TIFF format is very commonly used for scientific figures and images. Positron already has the ability to export images in this format, but not to open them.

There are, of course, extensions that can fix this, but I wanted to bring up the suggestion of embedding TIFF support directly into Positron. I’m suggesting this because it’s a fairly universal format in research, and as Positron is geared towards data science, I think it’s perhaps more appropriate than some other image formats.

[juliasilge]

Thanks for the suggestion, and for the context on how common this format is in academic health research. First-class TIFF support would definitely make sense given Positron's data science focus.

To explain why this isn't a quick fix, I'll explain that Positron inherits its image preview from upstream VS Code, which handles PNG, JPEG, GIF, SVG, and a few other formats via a built-in extension. That preview works by loading the file directly into a webview, essentially an <img> tag in the browser engine Positron runs on. Those formats work because Chromium can decode them natively, and TIFF is not one of them, so simply adding .tif/.tiff to the list of supported extensions would produce a broken preview rather than a working one. Real support would require bundling a TIFF decoder (JavaScript or WASM) into the preview, plus handling TIFF-specific concerns like multi-page files, which is a meaningfully larger piece of work.

In the meantime, marketplace extensions that add TIFF preview should work in Positron, as you noted.

We'll use this post to gather feedback and interest as we prioritize! If you'd like to help us scope what good support looks like, details about your use case (multi-page TIFFs, large microscopy images, and so on) would be useful.

[mburtin]

I know that it’s not just a simple file format and requires some decoding work, especially since there are indeed several types of TIFF files.

For my personal use, these are fairly simple TIFF files because we generate our figures directly after data processing in R (e.g., ggplot). Now, microscopy images are very common in biology. Although in my experience, many of the people involved often don’t have the background/profile to use R or Python, and prefer more graphics software like GraphPad.

The idea behind this post was just a simple suggestion for a long-term future. There are of course more urgent issues to address.