Image Tools·4 min read

TIFF to JPG: Convert Scans and Print Files

TIFF is the format of scanners, print shops, fax software and photo archives. It is reliable and flexible, but the files are large and most phones, browsers and upload forms will not display them. When you need to email a scan, attach it to an application or post it online, JPG is the practical choice. This guide covers what makes TIFF different, how the TIFF to JPG Converter on this site reads it without any upload, which variants work, and the settings that keep scanned text crisp.

Open the free TIFF to JPG Converter All insights

What TIFF is and why it is so large

A container built for quality, not speed.

TIFF, the Tagged Image File Format, dates from the 1980s and was designed for print and desktop publishing. A TIFF file is a flexible container: it can hold uncompressed pixels, several kinds of lossless compression, extra channels for transparency, CMYK colour for printing, and several pages in one file.

That flexibility is why archives and scanners like it, and also why the files are big. A single A4 colour scan at 300 DPI is roughly 2480 by 3508 pixels, and stored uncompressed in RGB that is about 26 MB of pixel data. The same page as a JPG at quality 85 is usually a few hundred KB to a couple of MB, depending on the content.

Why browsers and phones will not open TIFF

Only Safari reads it natively.

Chrome, Edge and Firefox do not display TIFF images, and most Android galleries do not either. Safari on Apple devices is the main exception. So a TIFF attachment that opens fine on a Mac can show up as a broken image for everyone else, and web forms that preview your upload usually reject it outright.

The TIFF to JPG Converter gets around this with its own TIFF reader written for the browser. It unpacks the file, turns the pixels into a normal image, and then saves it as JPG with the browser's encoder. Because everything runs inside the page, it works in Chrome, Edge and Firefox too, and the scan never leaves your device.

Converting TIFF to JPG step by step

Works for one scan or a whole folder.

Open the converter and drop a .tif or .tiff file onto the upload area, or click Choose folder to pick a folder of scans. A single file shows its size and pixel dimensions on a preview card, so you can check it opened correctly.

JPG is selected at High (90). If the scans are larger than you need, type a Max width such as 1600 or 2000 pixels, which also cuts the file size a lot. Press Convert to JPG. One file downloads with the same name and a .jpg extension; a batch shows each file's before and after size, a total for the batch, and downloads as converted-jpg.zip.

Which TIFF files are supported

The common variants, and one exception.

TIFF files differ in how the pixels are packed. The converter reads the kinds that scanners, Photoshop, GIMP and archive software normally write, and it tells you clearly when a file uses something it cannot read.

Compression: none, LZW, Deflate (also called ZIP) and PackBits.
Bit depth: 1-bit black and white, 4-bit and 8-bit, and 16-bit per channel, which is reduced to 8-bit for JPG.
Colour: greyscale, palette, RGB, RGB with transparency, and CMYK.
Layout: strips and tiles, including the horizontal predictor that LZW and Deflate files often use.
Not supported: JPEG-compressed TIFF and planar channel layouts. Re-save those as LZW TIFF in your editor first.
Multi-page files: the first page is converted.

Settings for scans, photos and print files

Match the output to the content.

Colour photos and colour scans suit JPG at quality 85 to 90. Scanned text is different: JPG adds faint smudges around sharp letter edges, especially at lower quality. For black and white documents, switch the Output format to PNG, which is lossless and stays small for pages with large white areas.

Print TIFFs are often CMYK. Screens and JPG files use RGB, so the converter translates CMYK with a simple formula. The colours come out close but are not colour-managed the way a print workflow would do it. If exact colour matters, ask the printer for an RGB export as well.

Transparency in a TIFF is filled with the background colour when saving JPG, white by default. PNG and WebP keep it.

Keeping archives safe

Convert for sharing, keep the master.

A JPG is a sharing copy. It is lossy, so re-saving it again and again slowly degrades it, and it cannot hold multiple pages or print colour. Keep the original TIFF files as your archive and treat the JPGs as disposable exports you can recreate at any time.

If a form asks for a specific pixel size and a KB limit, convert here first, then run the JPG through the Image Resizer, which can set an exact size in pixels or centimetres and keep the file under a size limit. For a multi-page scan that needs to stay together, a PDF is usually a better format than a folder of JPGs.