I have a client who needs a piece of software to take a random number of TIFFs and put them together into a TIFF Directory (multipage TIFF).
Currently I have proffered a script using ImageMagick/PerlMagick which simply creates a new image object, reads in all the other TIFFs in order, and writes. Thanks to ImageMagicks... well, magic, everything works and I have a perfect TIFF Directory.

Unfortunately the client is processing some 10s of thousands of TIFFs at a time, and ImageMagick through perl simply isn't quick enough - some 8 hours on a 1GHz box. I'd like to tell the client that doing that many freakin' TIFFs is just going to take some time, whether they like it or not - but I have no doubt there is a faster way to do it.
Again, unfortunately, while I'm not so shabby with perl - I generally wrestle with C.
Is anyone famaliar of a faster, perhaps more dedicated, TIFF manipulation library than I could use?
I suspect the solution is to write this in C, but with my skill in the language I'm probably asking for trouble.

My thanks for all your thoughts;
JP,

-- Alexander Widdlemouse undid his bellybutton and his bum dropped off --