is partial gz decompression possible?

Question

For working with images that are stored as .gz files (my image processing software can read .gz files for shorter/smaller disk time/space) I need to check the header of each

Answer 1

Yes, it is possible.

But don't reinvent the wheel, the HDF5 database supports different compression algorithms (gz among them) and you can address different pieces. It is compatible with Linux and Windows and there are wrappers to many languages. It also supports reading and decompressing in parallel, that is very useful if you use high compression rates.

Here is a comparison of read speed using different compression algorithms from Python through PyTables: