Compress repository tiff images

asked on February 1, 2022

Dear All,

A customer is complaining about his disk's rapid increase in size currently 2Tb of storage.

While troubleshooting whether there is nay anomalies within the system, we realized that some tiff images being generated by Laserfiche upon Scanning using QuickFields exceeds 5-6 Mbs even with some reaching 10Mbs and one almost 18Mbs.

I checked some answers here, and mostly all of them suggests using the Laserfiche Tool advised in this KB . Unfortunately, the tool is cannot be downloaded and i'm worried that it won't work since it was released a long time ago with no sign of update.

I took care of new generated tiff images by applying some changes in the user attributes in the windows client options, now the question is is there any other workaround in order to decrease the size of old stored tiff images?

Is it safe to use third party applications to perform this job ?

Your help is much appreciated!

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replied on February 1, 2022

Hi Joseph,

While it is possible to use third party tools such as ImageMagick to re-encode/compress the old TIFF images, I would recommend against it for a two main reasons. I've done this before at a customer's request and won't be doing it again.

Storage is cheap, your time isn't. You will spend a minimum of ten hours researching, developing, testing, and running the TIFF compression scripts. Unless you're doing this for free, the customer will end up paying far more in professional services than they will for the storage.
It is high-risk. Since you are likely not familiar with the third party tools, you risk data loss if there are minor misconfigurations in the parameters. The first time I attempted this, the scripts correctly compressed all the TIFFs we wanted them to and also "deleted" (overwrote with blank files) around 5% of the other TIFFs in the repository. We didn't immediately catch the deletions because we initially only checked the results on the files that were supposed to be affected. Had to restore Production from backups. If you do go ahead with this, make sure to check that your before and after file counts match.

If the customer strongly insists on doing something about the old TIFF sizes, consider reprocessing them using a Quick Fields session that overwrites the old large images with new smaller ones.

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replied on February 2, 2022

Hello Samuel,

Thank you for your answer,

Well, unfortunately the customer is insisting on handling those big size tiff files in a some way as his disk is almost full and he doesn't want to add another disk as long as we can do something about it.

Reprocessing these documents in Quickfields might be a draining task as the number of tiff images with a large size is big.

I'm gonna have to convince him otherwise and let him over look that matter. as you said we risk losing document images and they might be in no good shape for that kind of problem. (regardless of backing up their system). Plus, we have changed some settings to decrease a certain percentage of the file size.

Thank you again for your time Samuel!

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replied on February 2, 2022

You're welcome Joseph. Good luck and be careful. 2 TB isn't that much storage these days and the customer is like going to have to add more eventually anyway. Again, unless you've already committed to doing the services work for free (or it's covered by an existing agreement), give the customer a services quote/statement of work for a minimum of 10 hours. This may help them realize that adding more storage is still the more cost-effective option.

If you do have to do it:

You might also be able to use Laserfiche PhotoDocs (bundled with Laserfiche Client 10, but not 11) to reprocess the large images. Possibly more efficient than Quick Fields.

You can use Laserfiche search syntax to find entries with images over certain sizes. See page 46 of the attached document.

Advanced Search Syntax 10.3.pdf (1.42 MB)

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