Dry-run option, i.e. validator

[joshmoore]

I noticed today that if there were an option to validate that a conversion would work without actually converting, then NGFF-Converter (ignoring it's name) becomes the most user friendly way to test if a dataset is Bio-Formats compatible.

This may, however, require a bioformats2raw extra argument:

[melissalinkert]

@joshmoore : what's your thought on what it means for a conversion to work in this case? Is that just being able to create a valid METADATA.ome.xml and print the groups/array dimensions that would be written?

[joshmoore]

Hmmm... interesting. I was initially almost thinking more like showinf, but you're right that the strings for the hierarchy could be stored in memory and just shown to the user if they wanted to see them. (Though that'd be a good deal more GUI work)

An alternative, I guess, would be to do a "quick" conversion where just the metadata structure is created but we'd have to be careful that people don't misunderstand. metadata_only.zarr or something.