ImageIO.write returns false

[Tim McGuire]

bb turns out to be false in the following code, but a blank image is still created. That behavior confused me enough, but what is getting me now is how to use ImageIO.write to write a tif file to the file system?

java.awt.image.BufferedImage image = frame.getImage(false);
File outFile  =  new File( "test4.tif");
boolean bb = ImageIO.write(image, "tif", outFile);
System.out.println(outFile.length() + " and bb is " + bb);

I used the code I found here to list available image formats and of course tif is not listed:

jpeg
bmp
wbmp
gif
png
jpg
jpeg
bmp
wbmp
png
jpg
image/png
image/jpeg
image/x-png
image/vnd.wap.wbmp
image/bmp
image/gif
image/png
image/jpeg
image/x-png
image/vnd.wap.wbmp
image/bmp


documentation says ImageIO.write() "Writes an image using an arbitrary ImageWriter that supports the given format to a File."

I don't understand "arbitrary" here. Is there any way to force it to use a specific ImageWriter? or another way to write tif files?

In asking this question, I solved it. By comparing my environment with a previous environment that worked, I found that adding jai_imageio to my classpath fixed the issue. tif is now included in my available image formats. Without jai_imageio.jar, the code still compiles and runs, but it obviously uses a different ImageWriter. jai_imageio has a plugin directory with a class called TIFFImageWriter. I am still confused by how this is set up.