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: archive/old_tiffile_demo.py.

Raspberry Pi

tifffile ≥ 0.14 requires Numpy ≥ 1.11.

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

Old Numpy

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