[TorecLuik]

A managed v3 source previously bypassed a requested 0.4 export and reached the legacy Zarr 2 TIFF converter unchanged. TIFF-bound transfers now reuse compatible v2 sources or export the selected OMERO pixels temporarily as 0.4/v2. They skip canonical indexing, promotion and input markers, preserving the original backing store and annotations. Shallow selections export the selected pixels, including label views.

Fresh native Zarr exports default to 0.5/v3 across the transfer, ordinary, detached and batched workflow entry points. Explicit native 0.4 requests remain supported; existing native v2/v3 stores retain their format. Existing reconstruction-policy inputs carry the routing decision, with no new core/schema API or version bump.

Validation:

• Red/green regressions for incorrect v3 reuse, fresh exports, detached/replayed defaults and shallow Plate conversion material.
• Separate feature test harness: 322 passed, 4 skipped; compileall and diff checks passed.
• Live NL-BIOMERO: 11 Image/Plate transfer cases, all pixels and dtypes checked; source files and canonical annotations unchanged.
• Published cellularimagingcf/convert_zarr_to_tiff:2.0.0 (Zarr 2.16.1): exact TIFF pixels/dtypes for reused v2, exported v3, shallow primary and uint32 label images.

This is a local transfer/converter acceptance test, not a complete Slurm workflow or large-Plate benchmark. Normal Plate workflows remain native Zarr; this does not add Plate-to-TIFF workflow support or replace the legacy converter.

Tests live in the separate test/workflow-zarr-format-route PR targeting test-suite. Merge that capability-gated harness first and rerun this PR's check: the current canonical harness asserts the superseded shallow-Plate reconstruction behavior. Deploy these scripts before the companion OMERO.biomero web default change. NL-BIOMERO #52 must pin releases containing these changes before enabling v3 preprocessing for TIFF consumers.

[TorecLuik]

Current CI/merge order: the canonical harness run failed in three tests because its AST fixture lacks OME_ZARR_VERSION_0_4; it also retains the old shallow-Plate expectation. Both are corrected in #49. Merge the harness PR first, then rerun this PR's failed check. The full updated harness passes against both current master (297 passed, 29 skipped) and this feature source (322 passed, 4 skipped).

Companion web change: NL-BioImaging/OMERO.biomero#38. Local live acceptance passed for 11 Image/Plate transfer cases, including exact label pixels and unchanged canonical stores; four Image cases also passed the published Zarr 2.16.1 TIFF converter. Repeat verification used worker-local temporary staging after a Windows bind-mount directory rename lock. No installed scripts were replaced and no complete Slurm workflow was launched.