Convert HEIF to TIFF

Nobody converts a phone photograph to TIFF for their own convenience. The requirement comes from outside: a photo book supplier whose upload form lists TIFF, a lab, a journal submission with a figure specification, an archive with a deposit policy, a piece of instrument software that reads one format. TIFF has been in use since Aldus published it in 1986, and Adobe's since it bought Aldus in 1994; it is what those institutions standardised on.

That framing matters because it decides what a good result is. You are not looking for the best picture or the smallest file — you are looking for a file the recipient will not bounce. This converter is built for that: it writes the most boring, most universally readable TIFF there is.

TIFF is less a format than a filing system for images, and its readers agree on less than you would hope. LZW is patent-free and broadly supported. Deflate is not universally supported. JPEG-in-TIFF is really a different image inside a TIFF wrapper, and plenty of software that claims TIFF support chokes on it.

Somebody converting to TIFF is almost always feeding something particular, and the one thing every such reader accepts is the plain uncompressed baseline. So that is what gets written, with no compression choice offered, because offering one would mean offering a way to produce a file the recipient rejects.

With nothing compressed, the file size is the pixel count times four: red, green, blue and alpha, one byte each. A twelve-megapixel photograph at 4,032 by 3,024 is 12.2 million pixels, so the TIFF lands around 48 MB. The HEIF it came from was likely two or three.

That is a factor of twenty, and it is worth planning for before converting a folder. Twenty photographs is a gigabyte on disk and a slow upload at the other end. If the recipient's specification allows it, the maximum-width field is the only lever that changes this number, because it changes the pixel count itself rather than how the pixels are stored.

TIFF is one of the few formats on this site that can hold CMYK, and that capability is frequently why a printer asked for it. This converter does not use it: the output is RGB with an alpha channel, because a colour separation is not a format conversion.

Turning RGB into CMYK properly needs to know the press, the paper and the profile, and getting it wrong shifts every colour in the picture in a way nobody notices until a thousand copies are printed. If the specification names CMYK and a profile, do that step in software that understands them, and hand this TIFF to whoever is doing it.

TIFF supports multiple pages, layers and an editable working state — it is one of the few genuinely editable formats in the registry. None of that appears here. Each HEIF becomes one TIFF holding a single flat image.

The same is true on the way in. A HEIF container may hold several pictures, and the decoder takes the primary one, so a burst does not become a multi-page TIFF. If you need several photographs in one file, that is a job for an editor or for ImageMagick, and a folder of single-image TIFFs is the right input to it.

TIFF is specified to thirty-two bits per channel, matched here only by JPEG XL, and it can carry Lab and greyscale as well as RGB and CMYK. HEIF holds ten bits. On paper this conversion is comfortably lossless in depth terms.

What actually happens is eight bits per channel, because the picture crosses an eight-bit buffer between the decoder and the encoder. For a print of an ordinary photograph this is not the limiting factor — the press is — but if you were converting to TIFF specifically to preserve deep colour, this is not the path that does it.

TIFF can carry EXIF, XMP, IPTC, an ICC profile and GPS coordinates. The file this page writes carries none of them, because the picture is decoded to raw pixels and re-encoded, and no metadata block survives that.

For print submissions the one to watch is IPTC. Picture desks and photo book systems frequently read captions, credits and copyright from it, and a TIFF with an empty IPTC block reads as an uncredited photograph. If the recipient expects those fields, plan to add them in whatever software you use to check the file before sending it.

TIFF predates the web and no browser ever adopted it, which is the reason the registry records its browser support as none. Opening the converted file in a new tab does not preview it; it downloads it again or shows nothing.

Check the result in something that actually reads TIFF before you send it — Photoshop, Affinity Photo, macOS Preview or ImageMagick all do. That check is worth doing on the first file of a batch rather than on none of them, since the failure you are guarding against is a specification mismatch and it will look identical across all forty.

Both halves run in the browser tab, so the photographs are never uploaded. The free tier accepts inputs up to 100 MB each, which no HEIF approaches — but the outputs are the large half of this pair, and a folder of them will occupy real disk space and real time when your browser writes them.

A batch converts with a progress row per file and an "all as ZIP" button once two have finished. Bear in mind that a ZIP of uncompressed TIFFs does compress somewhat, since the raw pixel data has redundancy the format did not exploit, so the archive is smaller than the sum of its contents.

This site can read HEIF and cannot write it: decoding is libheif under LGPL-3.0, which a static site can ship with the conditions met, while writing would need an HEVC encoder under GPL, which it cannot. So there is no route from the TIFF back to the format you started with.

That makes the filing decision easy. The HEIF is the original and it costs almost nothing to keep; the 48 MB TIFF is a deliverable for one recipient and can be made again whenever another one asks. Deleting them after the job is finished is the sensible order of operations.

The format dates from 1986, Aldus's until Adobe bought the company in 1994, and it became the default in scanning, print and archiving for reasons that still hold: it stores pixels without discarding any, it can hold several pages, several layers, deep colour and CMYK, and its structure is a set of tagged fields that a reader can skip past when it does not understand them. That last property is why forty-year-old files still open.

Institutions also like that it is boring. There is no version negotiation, no browser dependency and no codec to license — the very things that make HEIF awkward outside the phone that produced it. A specification asking for TIFF is usually asking for a file that will still be readable long after everyone involved has moved on.

Open the first file of any batch in an image editor and check three things: the pixel dimensions, whether the whole subject is in frame, and whether the picture is the right way up. Rotation is the one that catches people out, since a phone records orientation in metadata and this conversion carries no metadata at all.

The reason to look rather than assume is that the TIFF carries no metadata of any kind, so there is no orientation tag in it for a viewer to act on — what you see when you open it is what the recipient will see, with nothing left to interpretation. Checking one file settles it for the batch, and it is a great deal cheaper than a resubmission — particularly with a recipient whose review cycle is measured in weeks rather than minutes.