Converting a multipage pdf to tiff

Let's fucking get to it, shall we?
We were building out a product for a bank, tying with multiple services. We had a flow where the customer was redirected to complete a VKYC on a third party service, and the service used to send out a webhook with a bunch of images and a PDF. We had to then push that to a third party CRM integrated with the bank. The problem, the CRM accepted only .tiff files.

It was pretty simple easy to convert the images to tiff via pillow. Converting the pdf took a lot of effort in terms of going through the documentation and reading stackoverflow comments.

The approach was simple, convert each of the PDF page to images (jpeg/png) and then merge them all together to form a multiple image TIFF.

import base64
from io import BytesIO
from pdf2image import convert_from_bytes


def _convert_pdf_to_tiff(base64str):
  image_base64_encoded = base64str.encode()
  content = base64.b64decode(image_base64_encoded)
  buffered = BytesIO()
  all_images = convert_from_bytes(content)
  all_images[0].save(buffered,
                     format="TIFF",
                     compression="jpeg",
                     save_all=True,
                     append_images=all_images[1:])
  return base64.b64encode(buffered.getvalue()).decode("utf-8")

The function takes in a base64 str value of the pdf. We convert the pdf to images using the pdf2image lib. It also has a convert_from_path function which takes in the path of the pdf file if you don't want to deal with raw bytes. The convert_from_bytes returns a List of Pillow Images, one image for every page in the pdf. You can also pass a thread_count parameter to the function, if you were running it on a multicore setup to speed up the conversion especially for larger files.

The pillow images then can be save to a different format (TIFF), and it also accepts a append_images parameter. The final output is a TIFF file with all the images inside it.