Writing multipage TIFF with Python

March 30, 2019

An easy, robust way to write multipage TIFF on any platform in Python is imageio.

For all examples below, assume a stack of images in an Numpy ndarray imgs, with dimensions:

ImageIO is a library we have contributed code to and recommend in general for Python image IO.

pip install imageio

import imageio

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

tifffile

ImageIO uses tifffile internally, so most don’t need to use tifffile directly. To use tifffile directly, install tifffile.py:

pip install tifffile

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.

The de facto TIFF header tags. can be read from the command line with Perl Image::ExifTool

apt install libimage-exiftool-perl

exiftool myfile.tif

Note: tiffinfo doesn’t print tiff tags.

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')

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

if you get:

RuntimeError: Could not find a FreeImage library

Fix by downloading the FreeImage binaries and extract Dist/x64/FreeImage.dll to the directory found by:

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

If you get:

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

Fix by:

apt install libfreeimage3

To fix tifffile error caused by too-old Numpy version:

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

Install a newer Numpy version:

pip install numpy

pip install tifffile

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