Question

What’s the best way to split a multi-page TIFF with python? PIL doesn’t seem to have support for multi-page images, and I haven’t found an exact port for libtiff for python. Would PyLibTiff be the way to go? Can somebody provide a simple example of how I could parse multiple pages within a TIFF?

Answer 1

I do use ImageMagick as external program to convert multi-page fax into viewable PNGs:

/usr/bin/convert /var/voip/fax/out/2012/04/fax_out_L1_17.tiff[0] -scale 50x100% -depth 16 /tmp/fax_images/fax_out_L1_17-0-m.png

does convert first page to PNG

aaa.tiff[1] would be second page, and so on.

Or to extract all images, do:

convert -verbose fax_in_L1-1333564876.469.tiff a.png
fax_in_L1-1333564876.469.tiff[0] TIFF 1728x1078 1728x1078+0+0 1-bit Bilevel DirectClass 109KiB 0.030u 0:00.030
fax_in_L1-1333564876.469.tiff[1] TIFF 1728x1078 1728x1078+0+0 1-bit Bilevel DirectClass 109KiB 0.020u 0:00.010
fax_in_L1-1333564876.469.tiff[2] TIFF 1728x1078 1728x1078+0+0 1-bit Bilevel DirectClass 109KiB 0.020u 0:00.010
fax_in_L1-1333564876.469.tiff=>a-0.png[0] TIFF 1728x1078 1728x1078+0+0 1-bit Bilevel DirectClass 12KiB 0.030u 0:00.019
fax_in_L1-1333564876.469.tiff=>a-1.png[1] TIFF 1728x1078 1728x1078+0+0 1-bit Bilevel DirectClass 8KiB 0.040u 0:00.039
fax_in_L1-1333564876.469.tiff=>a-2.png[2] TIFF 1728x1078 1728x1078+0+0 1-bit Bilevel DirectClass 32KiB 0.070u 0:00.070

So, to just split one multi-page TIFF into many-page TIFF you would have to execute:

convert in-12345.tiff /tmp/out-12345.tiff

and then work with temporary files: /tmp/out-12345-*.tiff

However ImageMagick can do a lot of processing, so you can probably achieve your desired result in one command.