Convert TIFF to PNG

Both formats store exact pixel values. TIFF holds them in a container built for print and archival workflows; PNG holds them in a container the whole web understands. Moving between the two changes the wrapper and not the picture, so the PNG is pixel-for-pixel what the TIFF was.

That is the entire argument for choosing this over TIFF to JPG. JPG would produce a much smaller file and would throw away detail to do it — a fine trade for a scanned letter, a bad one for artwork, a render, or anything that will be edited again afterwards.

This is now one of the most common ways people end up holding a TIFF they cannot use. Upscalers and print-oriented image tools write TIFF because it loses nothing, so a photo enlarged four times comes back as an uncompressed file of 100 MB or more that no browser will display and no messaging app will accept.

PNG is the right destination for that file specifically because the work was done to add detail, and JPG would immediately spend some of it. Expect a substantial size drop anyway — the TIFF is usually uncompressed and the PNG never is — with the enlarged detail fully intact.

If any part of the image is meant to be see-through, PNG is not a preference but the only workable answer among common formats. The alpha channel converts across directly, so cut-out product shots, logos, overlays and rendered elements keep their transparent background.

The failure mode is worth naming because it is silent. Convert the same file to JPG and the transparent areas become solid white, with no warning and no way back. People usually discover this after placing the image on a coloured background.

Scanners, cameras and print workflows often write TIFFs with 16 bits per colour channel — 65,536 levels each — where PNG here is written at 8 bits, or 256 levels. The conversion maps one onto the other, and for viewing, sending and publishing the difference is invisible.

It matters in one situation: heavy editing afterwards. The extra bit depth exists so that strong curves and exposure changes do not band a gradient, and once it is gone that headroom is gone. If the file is going back into a retouching pass, keep the TIFF as the working copy and treat the PNG as the version you distribute.

A large share of TIFFs in circulation carry no compression at all, because the systems that wrote them cared about compatibility rather than size. PNG always compresses, and it does so losslessly — it finds repetition and encodes it more briefly rather than discarding detail.

How much it saves depends entirely on the image. Screenshots, diagrams, line art and anything with flat colour compress enormously. Photographs and film-grain scans compress modestly, because noise is by definition not repetitive. Either way the pixels that come out are the pixels that went in.

TIFFs produced for print are frequently CMYK, the four-ink model presses use. PNG has no CMYK mode at all, so the conversion moves the image to RGB, and some colours shift slightly because the two models cannot represent exactly the same range.

The visible effect is usually confined to saturated cyans and deep blues. For reviewing, sending or putting the image on screen this is unimportant. If the file is going back to a printer, send the original TIFF and use the PNG only as the copy people look at.

TIFF is less a format than a family, which is why one file converts instantly and another refuses. Uncompressed, LZW, Deflate and PackBits variants are read here, and they cover the overwhelming majority of files in circulation.

The ones that fail are the specialised branches: JPEG-compressed TIFF, the Group 3 and Group 4 fax encodings that some document scanners still write, and proprietary camera variants. If a file will not open, that is nearly always why — and a failure here is a readable message rather than a broken image.

Drop up to a hundred TIFFs and each converts independently, returned together as a ZIP. Scanners and render queues produce these in batches, so converting one at a time is rarely what anyone actually needs.

Because nothing is uploaded, the batch costs no bandwidth and joins no queue. It costs memory on your own machine instead, which is the real constraint when each file is 100 MB — converting in groups of ten is more reliable than dropping the full hundred at once.

The conversion runs in your browser tab, so the image is never transmitted. Beyond the privacy of it, this is the practical reason the page works at all: an upload-based converter has to move a 90 MB file twice, and most of them refuse files that size outright.

The ceiling here is 100 MB a file, and under it there is no queue, no account and no retention period to ask about. The TIFFs people need converted are often the largest files they own, so the size is worth reading off the file before dropping it.