Writing multipage TIFF with Python

The best/easiest way to write multipage TIFF on any platform (Windows, Mac, Linux) is imageio. In all the examples:

imgs.shape

(Nimg,y,x) for monochrome. (Nimg,y,x,3) for RGB color.

python -m pip install imageio

import imageio

imageio.mimwrite('myimgs.tiff',imgs)

tifffile

The next best way to write multipage TIFF from Python is tifffile, which imageio uses internally.

Install tifffile.py:

python -m pip install tifffile

Example

import tifffile

tifffile.imsave('myimages.tiff',imgs)

tifffile.imsave() is capable of description and tags arguments and to compress losslessly.

Advanced Python TIFF multi-page writing example: Demo_image_write_multipage.py.

Raspberry Pi

tifffile ≥ 0.7 requires Numpy 1.13, while the Raspberry Pi has Numpy 1.12 with most up to date Raspbian 9.1 currently available.

I worked around this issue by

python -m pip install numpy

python -m pip install tifffile

Since there is a Numpy .whl for ARM, the latest Numpy installs quickly on Raspberry Pi.

This fixes tifffile error:

RuntimeError: module compiled against API version 0xb but this version of numpy is 0xa

Read TIFF headers

There are de facto TIFF header tags. These can be read from the command line with

apt install libimage-exiftool-perl

exiftool myfile.tif

Note: tiffinfo doesn’t print tiff tags

Print all TIFF tags from Python using PrintTiffTags.py

Other methods

Alternative multipage-Tiff method using scikit-image and FreeImage: (we recommend imageio or tifffile instead)

from skimage.io._plugins import freeimage_plugin as freeimg 

freeimg.write_multipage(imgs,'myimages.tiff')

Fix scikit-image errors

Due to the large number of image libraries invoked, sometimes scikit-image needs a little tweaking for image I/O:

Windows

if you get error:

RuntimeError: Could not find a FreeImage library

Fix by:

1. download the FreeImage binaries
2. extract Dist/x64/FreeImage.dll to

   $(python -c "import skimage; print(skimage.__path__[0])")/io/_plugins/
   

Linux

If you get error:

freeimage had a problem: Could not find a FreeImage library in any of…

Fix by:

apt install libfreeimage3

reference