When capturing images from a lab camera, you might find yourself with a bunch of .tiff images.

The first thing you will need is the ImageMagick package for Ubuntu. You can get it using:

sudo apt-get install imagemagick

This package contains a very convenient convert function, it can be used to convert a .tiff image into a .png while keeping transparency using:

convert inputfile.tiff -transparent white outputfile.png

You can then use this command to recursively treat any file in the folder with a simple grep and some batch scripting:

    #!/bin/sh
    for file in `ls | grep tif`
    do
        convert "$file" -transparent white "${file}.png"
        echo "writing ${file}.png"
    done

To use it, you simply need to put a bunch of .tiff files in the same folder, and execute the script. If your files are recorded as .tif and not .tiff, you will need to change it in the second line of the script.

Final tip: If any other file in the folder (it can be the script itself) contains the letters T-I-F-F in this order, it will be transformed into a .png even if it is a text file.

Source, more details: http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/blog/tools/convert-tiff-to-transparent-png

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