Install tiff2png with Homebrew

Project links

• Homepage
• Repository

Commands and aliases

• tiff2png

Project history

The official page credits Willem van Schaik, Greg Roelofs, and Ralph Giles as authors and presents version 0.92 as the current release. It also records earlier lineage through Willem van Schaik's separate 0.7 offshoot, labelled 0.82, and explains behavioral differences around wildcard batch conversion and overwrite handling.

The project sits close to the PNG ecosystem rather than the modern image-toolkit world: the official page is hosted under libpng's PNG applications area and lists libpng, zlib, libtiff, and IJG JPEG libraries as supporting components.

Adoption history

The official page lists source tarballs, a GitHub repository, git mirrors, and older platform binaries for systems including SCO OpenServer and 32-bit Windows. That distribution style reflects an older portable C utility that survived through source archives, mirrors, and package-manager formulas.

Homebrew keeps tiff2png available as a narrow utility for users who want one conversion command rather than a full ImageMagick-style suite.

How it is used

tiff2png is used for batch conversion, with the official page giving a wildcard example such as converting multiple .tiff files at once. It is especially relevant when users care about preserving transparency while producing PNG output.

For package users, the practical use case is scripted image conversion in build, publishing, archival, or web pipelines where a dedicated TIFF-to-PNG binary is simpler than invoking a larger image-processing framework.

Why package nerds care

Its package-nerd significance is mostly historical and practical: it is the sort of small, old-school image utility that package managers preserve because scripts depend on exact command names and behaviors.

The official warning about a related offshoot lacking wildcard support and overwrite checks is a reminder that tiny conversion tools often matter because their edge-case behavior is part of the package contract.

Timeline

• 2000-2005, 2014: Copyright years shown on the official tiff2png page.
• 2000s: Official page documents version 0.92, older platform binaries, and support libraries.
• 2014: GitHub repository created for rillian/tiff2png as a libpng.org-derived conversion utility.

Related projects

• The official page links the utility to libpng, zlib, libtiff, and the Independent JPEG Group library.
• The official page also notes Willem van Schaik's separate 0.82-labelled offshoot from version 0.7.

Sources

• http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/apps/tiff2png.html - official tiff2png page for purpose, authors, version, lineage, usage, source links, binaries, and supporting libraries.
• https://api.github.com/repos/rillian/tiff2png - GitHub repository metadata for creation date and description.