Opening Files

QuickStart

Where possible, pims detects the type of file(s) automatically. Here are some examples.

import pims
images = pims.open('my_directory/*.png')  # many PNGs with sequential names
images = pims.open('my_directory/*.tif')  # many TIFs with sequential names
images = pims.open('tiff_stack.tif')  # one TIF file containing many frames

Using Specific Readers

PIMS has several built-in readers. If you don’t want to use open to dispatch to them automatically, you can use them directly. For example:

import pims
images = pims.ImageSequence('my_directory/*.png')

The main readers are:

• ImageSequence
• TiffStack
• Video
• Bioformats

See their individual pages for details.

If you have a file format not yet supported by PIMS, it is easy to define your own reader and get PIMS lazy-loading and slicing behavhior “for free.” See Custom Readers.