Release of Bio-Formats 7.3.0

Today we are releasing Bio-Formats 7.3.0 which includes compatibility and support for Bio-Formats with Java-21 alongside a number of format improvements including updates for DICOM, CellSens VSI, and PerkinElmer Columbus.

The full list of changes included in this release are as follows:

File format fixes and improvements:

• CellSens VSI
  • fixed an exception in CellSens 4.1 data by updating the handling of orphaned ets files (thanks to Edward Scanlon)
• DICOM
  • updated handling of nested sequences that include pixel data
  • removed a duplicate enum check in the DICOM writer
• OME-XML
  • reading an OME-XML file now populates the original metadata table
• PerkinElmer Columbus
  • added support for reading data with Z stacks (thanks to Tim Blackmore)
• Prairie Technologies TIFF
  • improved type checking for Prairie files
• SimplePCI
  • fixed handling of Z position metadata

Bio-Formats improvements:

• Bio-Formats is now compatible with Java 21 builds
• added a new quality option to bfconvert which enables the setting of the compression quality to be used.
• when using the channel option in bfconvert, the unselected channels are now correctly removed from the OME-XML metadata
• added coverage of Apple M1 as part of the CI process
• added coverage of Java 21 builds as part of the CI process

Component updates:

• ome-jai was upgraded to 0.1.4
• ome-stubs was upgraded to 6.0.2
• ome-mdbtools was upgraded to 5.3.3
• ome-common was upgraded to 6.0.22
• ome-poi was upgraded to 5.3.9
• ome-metakit was upgraded to 5.3.7
• ome-codecs was upgraded to 1.0.3
• ome-xml was upgraded to 6.3.6
• specification was upgraded to 6.3.6

Documentation improvements:

• fixed a number of broken external links
• documented the new quality option in bfconvert