Open/read multiple .tif images from multiple folders on different levels

July 2, 2022

So, the scheme is that I have a folder, inside which there are other folders with .tif images. For instance I have something like that:

folder_1/folder_2/folder_3/image_1.tif
folder_1/folder_2/image_2.tif
folder_1/image_3.tif
folder_1/folder_2/folder_3/image_4.tif

I need to read all the .tif images from all folders. I tried this suggestion: Loading all images using imread from a given folder but it does not work for variable path folders, as my scheme. So, after searching I tried this suggestion: Loading multiple images from multiple folders in python but I get this error:

    raise UnidentifiedImageError(
PIL.UnidentifiedImageError: cannot identify image file(....)

Any idea how to read all .tif images from all folders, which vary in "folder distance" from the initial folder?

>Solution :

The glob module helps with this.

from glob import glob
import os.path
parent_dir = "C:\\folder_1"  # Or wherever your parent folder is
all_tif_file_paths = glob(os.path.join(parent_dir, "**", "*.tif"), recursive=True)

The "**" there means ‘any number (including zero) of intervening directories’, and when you use it, you need to specify recursive=True.

Then you can loop over all_tif_file_paths and read each file in turn.