Certain aspects of the present disclosure provide techniques for scalably and efficiently converting linear image data into multi-dimensional image data for multimedia applications. In one example, a method for managing image data includes receiving a line of image data in a linear format via a system bus of width T, wherein the image data's native format is a tile format of H lines per tile; forming H subsets of image data from the line of image data in the linear format; writing the H subsets of image data to a memory comprising BN=H banks of BW=T/BN pixel width, wherein each subset of the H subsets is written to a different bank of the BN banks; and outputting the H subsets of image data in the tile format.