Convert TIFF to JPG

TIFF is older than the web and was never adopted by it. No browser displays one — not Chrome, not Safari, not Firefox — and most phones will not preview one either. It survives in the places it was designed for: scanners, fax systems, medical imaging, professional printing and long-term archives, all of which value exactness over convenience.

That is why a TIFF arriving by email is stuck. Windows and macOS will usually show it in their own preview tools, but forwarding it, uploading it to a form or putting it in a document means the person at the other end sees nothing. JPG has the opposite property: it is the most widely readable image format there has ever been.

TIFF is frequently stored with no compression at all, which is deliberate — an archive wants every pixel exactly as scanned. The consequence is that a single A4 page at scanning resolution can be twenty or thirty megabytes, and a ten-page scan can exceed most email attachment limits by itself.

The same page as a JPG at good quality is typically one to three megabytes. That is not a marginal improvement; it is the difference between a document you can send and one you cannot. If the scan is going to a person rather than into an archive, this conversion is almost always the right move.

Scanners often produce one TIFF containing every page of a document, because the format allows it. JPG does not: one file, one picture, no exceptions. Converting a ten-page scan to JPG gives you page one and silently leaves the rest behind, which is the failure most likely to catch somebody out here.

If you have a multi-page TIFF and want to keep the document intact, convert it to PDF instead. PDF has pages, is as universally readable as JPG, and is what a scanned document should usually have been in the first place. Check the page count in a preview before converting if you are not sure what you have.

TIFF is normally lossless and JPG is not, so some detail is discarded. For a scanned text document at the default quality this is essentially invisible — the letters stay sharp and the page looks like the page. The compression only becomes noticeable on close inspection or after printing at a large size.

If the copy is going to be read carefully, printed properly, or kept as the record, raise the quality setting under the result, or convert to PNG instead: PNG is lossless like TIFF, still opens everywhere, and produces a much smaller file than an uncompressed TIFF while discarding nothing at all.

Consider what people are actually holding when they search for this. A letter from a hospital. Correspondence from a solicitor. An insurance claim. A scan of a passport or a birth certificate sent by an office that still uses a fax machine. The category is heavily weighted towards documents that ought not to be uploaded to an unknown website.

This page reads the TIFF and writes the JPG entirely inside your browser, with code the page downloaded. Nothing is transmitted, there is no account, and there is no queue. It also works with the network disconnected once the page has loaded, which is a reasonable thing to do with a document you would rather not have online at all.

TIFF is less a format than a family. The common cases — uncompressed, LZW, PackBits and Deflate — read without trouble, and between them they cover almost everything a scanner or an office produces.

The awkward ones are the specialist variants: JPEG-inside-TIFF from some cameras, CMYK files out of a print workflow, and 16-bit-per-channel scientific images. Where a file cannot be read you get a clear failure rather than a mangled picture, which is the honest outcome — a converter that quietly handed back grey would be worse.

A TIFF from a print workflow is often CMYK, the four-ink model a press works in. JPG on the web is RGB, the three-light model a screen works in, and the two do not describe the same set of colours.

The conversion moves the image into RGB, which has to happen for it to display anywhere at all. Deep cyans and rich blacks are where the shift shows. If colour accuracy is the reason the file was a TIFF in the first place, it should stay a TIFF and go to the printer as one.

Upscalers and print-oriented image tools write TIFF because it discards nothing, which means a photograph enlarged four times comes back as an uncompressed file of well over 100 MB. That file will not attach to an email, will not upload to most portals and will not open in a browser, so it is stuck at exactly the point where somebody wants to look at it.

JPG is the right answer when the enlargement is finished and simply needs to reach a person — expect something in the low single-digit megabytes with no visible difference on screen. If the image is instead going into further editing, printing or another pass of upscaling, convert it to PNG rather than here, so the detail the upscale added survives the trip.

Drop the lot. Each TIFF becomes its own JPG and they come back as a ZIP, which suits the usual case of an office scanner that produced one file per page.

Because the work happens on your machine, the practical limit is memory rather than a plan tier. Uncompressed TIFFs are the heaviest files on this site, so a folder of thirty-megabyte scans is worth doing fifty at a time rather than five hundred.

A TIFF out of a scanner carries tags: the device, the resolution it scanned at, the date, sometimes the software and the operator's machine name. None of it maps onto the JPG. The tags are read to get the image out and are then left behind, because the JPG is encoded from the decoded pixels and from nothing else.

That does make the conversion a way of shedding scanner details, and the result needs no second pass to confirm it. It is worth knowing which way the trade runs, though: if the scanning resolution or the capture date is part of what the document has to prove, keep the TIFF, because the JPG can no longer say either.