What is the fastest way to get the number of pages in a multi-page TIFF file?

I have a stack of images saved as a multi-page TIFF file. I want to extract the number of images (pages) without reading all of them into MATLAB.

Currently, I am using the following code:

info = imfinfo('myfile.tif');
n = length(info);

Is there a better/faster way?

Answer 1

[Mann Baidi]

Hi @Matthew Eicholtz,

Yes, you can achieve some performance improvement over using "imfinfo" by utilizing the TIFF object in MATLAB. You can write a script to iterate through the directories in the TIFF file and count them. Additionally, you can compare the performance enhancement for determining the number of pages in a TIFF file by executing the code provided below:

function numImages = countTiffPages(filename)

hTif = Tiff(filename,'r');

numImages = 1;
while ~hTif.lastDirectory()
    numImages = numImages + 1;
    hTif.nextDirectory();
end
hTif.setDirectory(1);

close(hTif);
end
tic
info = imfinfo('large_multistack_image.tiff');
n = length(info)
toc
tic

countTiffPages('large_multistack_image.tiff')
toc

For more information on the TIFF Object, please refer to the following documentation:

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/tiff.html

Hoping this willl resolve your query!