Even though the computers today have so much physical memory and operating system provides virtual memory system, there are some restrictions on large image manipulation. The first restriction is that the major 32-bit operating systems currently have 2GB restriction on their implementation and we could not use the linear memory space larger than 2GB (Actually, we don't get all of 2GB, since...).
All you have to know is that you don't have to load what you don't need. You don't have to do your homeworks if your teacher never checks them. Same thing holds true to open an image file. If the user only interests in the metadata, you don't have to load the image. If the user does not want to see whole image, you should not load whole image.
In PixelLive SDK, there're Doc and Image class. If your code only needs metadata, all you have to do is create Doc instances.
This document is automatically generated using doxygen 1.5.4 at Fri Jun 27 18:22:54 2008.
