Visual Resources Center

Validating TIFF Files

Validating your TIFF files for Preservation on a Mac

Comments and corrections welcome!

Requirements
-OS X 1-.3 or higher
-Terminal
-Comfort with command-line/OS X directory structure

1. Download JHOVE. (http://hul.harvard.edu/jhove/download.html)
This document is written to work with JHOVE 1.0


2. After you uncompress the file, you should have a folder called "jhove". Put this folder wherever you would like it to live, but make sure you know the absolute path to the directory (this will be necessary in the next step, and later) I put it in /Applications and also tried /usr/bin/. If you try something like the latter path, you would need to move the file in terminal and would need root/sudo privileges.

(There is probably an optimal place to put it, but I don't know where that would be.)


3. Inside your jhove folder there is a subfolder called "conf". Inside of this folder is your configuration file. It is called jhove.conf. Open this file with a text editor and edit only the following line:
(A per the documentation, you could also, at this point, edit the location of the Temp directory. The default is /var/tmp, which seemed fine to me.)


4. In the main "jhove" directory, open the file called "jhove" and edit the following:


5. You are now ready to give JHOVE a spin! Start by loading up the configuration file by entering:


6. You should now be ready to invoke JHOVE! The command takes the basic form of:

/Applications/jhove/jhove Desktop/TIFValidation/sampleFiles/78729.tif -m TIFF-hul -c /Applications/jhove/conf/jhove.conf

7. This should result in a lengthy report on your TIFF file, but they key points you are looking for are the STATUS and any Error Messages. For valid TIFFs, you will actually get a STATUS message that the file is well formed, but not valid, with the sole error message, like so:

This is a known error, and your file is actually perfectly valid. Other status/error messages are indications of issues with your TIFF files.

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