My new project is digitizing film negatives. Following advice found on the DataHoarder subreddit, I’m scanning these files in the highest possible quality in uncompressed TIF files. These TIF files are too big for regular consumption, thus the need to convert to JPG.

ImageMagick is amazing, and does the job nicely. Make sure you have the imagemagick package installed, and it’s as simple as using the convert command.

This is my simple script for converting all TIF files to JPG, and outputting them to the same directory:

for file in *.tif; do echo converting "$file" to "${file%.*}.jpg"; convert "$file" "${file%.*}.jpg"; done

It uses bash substitution to remove the TIF extension in the resulting JPG file. It works beautifully!

Update 4/14/2023:

I have re-worked this a bit to handle multiple directories. It involves setting the Internal Field Separator to be ‘ \n’ instead of space (default) and using the find command. The multi-directory command is below:

IFS=$'\n'; for file in $(find . -name *.tif); do echo converting "$file" to "${file%.*}.jpg"; convert "$file" "${file%.*}.jpg"; done;unset IFS