I have many times built software that worked both ways to measure the frequency at high rates and then revert to period measurement at low rates.

Even better is that with careful design it is even quite feasible to measure periods of signals that may be many many times slower than the count out period of the timer.
Note that input captures work nicely for this if you can also interrupt on the counter overflow to deal with the timer being too short by extending the count into a memory location at the interrupt time.
Mike Karas