Multithreaded TIFF to PNG conversion

Question

I'm working with images of scanned books, so hundreds of high resolution pictures. I'm doing conversion work with Photoshop Elements - I can quickly save them to uncompressed TIFF, but converting to compressed PNG using a single thread takes ages.

Do you know a software, ideally simple and free, that would batch convert those TIFFs to PNG in a multi-threaded manner (4 to 8 simultaneous files) to take advantage of those cores and cut converting times? I'm not too worried in slight variations in final size.

Answer 1

If you're converting a large number of files, you could use GNU parallel in combination with imagemagick to perform multiple jobs simultaneously.

parallel -j 8 convert {} {.}.png ::: *.tiff

...will convert every img.tiff in a directory to an img.png, performing 8 jobs at a time. If you ditch the -j 8, parallel will default to one job per CPU core.

To convert recursively, combine find with parallel:

find . -type f -name "*.tiff" | parallel -j 8 convert {} {.}.png

Answer 2

ImageMagick is an excellent free piece of software that is able to do what you ask via the command line. Here is an excerpt from the multithread information.

Using it is as simple as typing convert image.tif image.png but can be used with all kinds of options enabled to suit your needs. Check the documentation for more info on this.

Answer 3

Writing (i.e., compressing) a single PNG file as multithreaded is possible, but hairy. An open source implementation is https://github.com/anvio/png-parallel, linked from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10827247/parallelization-of-png-file-creation-with-c-libpng-and-openmp .

If possible, instead compress multiple PNG's, one per thread, as evilsoup suggests.