{"id":983,"date":"2020-09-07T00:53:04","date_gmt":"2020-09-06T16:53:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.yohz.com\/blogs\/?p=983"},"modified":"2020-09-07T00:59:12","modified_gmt":"2020-09-06T16:59:12","slug":"merge-or-combine-tiff-files","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.yohz.com\/blogs\/2020\/09\/07\/merge-or-combine-tiff-files\/","title":{"rendered":"Merge or combine TIFF files"},"content":{"rendered":"

We had a user who recently asked if SQL Blob Export<\/a> is able to merge or combine the extracted single-page TIFF files from her database into multi-page TIFF files.\u00a0 This feature isn’t built-in, but we have provided an external command line application (MergeTiff<\/a>) that you can freely use to perform the same task.<\/p>\n

You can use MergeTiff<\/a> on any tif files, including those extracted using SQL Image Viewer<\/a>, SQL Blob Export<\/a>, and Access OLE Export<\/a>.\u00a0 It is important that the extracted files use names that group the pages into the right order.<\/p>\n

For e.g. the default naming convention for exported files in SQL Image Viewer<\/a> is row and column index, so assuming each row in your result set only had 1 blob column, your exported files would be named this way:<\/p>\n

0001_0001.tif
\n0002_0001.tif
\n0003_0001.tif
\n…<\/p>\n

This isn’t going to help MergeTiff<\/a>\u00a0determine how to group the files.\u00a0 What you need is a ‘grouping’ value e.g. say a CustomerID column that identifies the customer each image belongs to.\u00a0 We then use this naming convention in SQL Image Viewer<\/a>\/ SQL Blob Export<\/a>\/ Access OLE Export<\/a>:<\/p>\n

<CustomerID>_<%row:0000%><\/p>\n

and our exported files may be named this way:<\/p>\n

A00123_0001.tif
\nA00123_0002.tif
\nA00123_0003.tif
\nC72186_0006.tif
\nD12472_0007.tif
\nE88822_0004.tif
\nE88822_0005.tif<\/p>\n

In this way, we know that for customer A00123, we need to merge 3 files, for customer E88822, we need to merge 2 files, and so on.<\/p>\n

To use MergeTiff<\/a>, you need to provide at least 1 parameter:<\/p>\n