Converting microarray images
Microarray images are generally stored as 16-bit TIFF images (usually around 100Mb in size. An alternative lossy image format is JPEG format, which is still bloated at around 40Mb filesize. Investigating the image size of a typical GenePix derived JPEG image, the pixel size is 4400 × 14300 pixels (72 pixels per inch) with an aspect ratio of 3.25 . A general visual summary of these lossy images is all that is required where they could be converted to a much smaller thumbnail PNG type image using an appropriate program such as ImageMagick or Gimp which allows batch processing of multiple images a once.
Imagemagick
The command line binary convert is useful for resizing images, for example;
|
convert -size 800x600 input.jpg'[80x60]' output.png |
will resize and convert a JPEG to a PNG. The command line tool mogrify will convert an entire directory of images; mogrify -format jpg -size 800x600 *.jpg
