Convert TIFF to JPG
TIFF is what scanners, microscopes and archives write when nobody has told them to economise. The files are enormous and open in almost nothing outside a photo editor, which is why this conversion exists — you are trading an archival master for something you can actually send.
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Up to 50 MB. Deleted automatically after 30 minutes.
What it does
- Typically ten to thirty times smaller than the source
- Opens on every phone, browser and email client
- Handles the compressed and uncompressed TIFF variants alike
- No watermark and no sign-up
How to use TIFF to JPG
- 1
Add the TIFF
Scanned documents, photographs digitised from film, instrument captures, or images from a design workflow. Files ending .tif and .tiff are the same format.
- 2
Convert
The image is decoded and re-encoded as JPEG on our server, because no browser can open a TIFF at all.
- 3
Keep the original
The TIFF is your master copy and the JPEG is a derivative. Once the original is deleted, the discarded detail is gone permanently, and archive scans are usually made precisely so that does not happen.
How it works
The TIFF is decoded — whichever of the format's many compression schemes it happens to use — and the resulting pixels are re-encoded as JPEG at a quality level chosen to be visually transparent on photographic material.
The size reduction comes from two places at once. TIFF usually stores every pixel exactly; JPEG discards high-frequency detail the eye weights lightly, and then compresses what remains. Both steps are large, which is why the ratios here are so much more dramatic than converting between two modern formats.
What TIFF was actually for
The format is old, deliberately extensible, and built for production rather than distribution. That explains its habits.
Archival scanning. Libraries and records offices standardized on it because an uncompressed file has no codec to become unreadable in forty years.
Photography and print. Sixteen bits per channel, CMYK color, embedded color profiles, layers in some variants — everything a print workflow needs and a web format has no use for.
Instruments. Microscopes, satellites and medical imaging write TIFF because it stores exact measured values and tolerates unusual pixel formats.
None of those uses involve sending the file to somebody. That is the gap this conversion fills.
Decide by what happens next
Sending it to a person. JPEG. It opens everywhere and the size drop is what makes the file sendable at all.
Putting it on a web page. WebP or AVIF instead — same convenience, smaller still.
Text documents, several pages. PDF, not JPEG. It keeps the pages together and is what the recipient expects a document to be.
Any further editing. Stay in TIFF while you work. Every JPEG save is permanent, and the losses accumulate across a sequence of edits in a way a single conversion does not.
Resolution is a separate decision
A 600 DPI scan is roughly 5000 pixels across. Converting it to JPEG makes the file smaller but leaves it just as oversized for a screen, where perhaps 1500 pixels is generous.
If the destination is a web page or an email rather than a printer, resize as well as convert. The two together produce a file measured in hundreds of kilobytes rather than megabytes, and nothing visible is given up at the size it will actually be viewed.
Examples
A scanned A4 page at 600 DPI
Twenty-seven times smaller with the text still perfectly legible. The original stored three bytes for every pixel of what is mostly white paper; JPEG's compression is built for exactly that redundancy. For emailing a signed document this is the right file.
A film photograph digitised for archiving
The bit depth halves as well as the size, which matters more than it sounds. Sixteen bits per channel is what makes heavy exposure correction survivable; at eight bits, pushing the shadows opens up banding. Edit the TIFF, then export a JPEG.
Frequently asked questions
How much smaller will the file be?
Usually between ten and thirty times, and occasionally far more. An uncompressed TIFF stores every pixel at full precision with no attempt to economise, so a 100 MB scan routinely becomes a 4 MB JPEG that looks the same on screen. TIFFs already compressed with LZW or ZIP start smaller and shrink less dramatically.
Why will nothing open my TIFF?
Because TIFF is a container specification rather than a single format, and software supports different subsets of it. A file can hold LZW, ZIP, JPEG, or CCITT fax compression, use unusual color spaces, or carry many pages, and a reader that handles one variant may reject another. No browser attempts it at all, which is why this page uploads.
What happens to multi-page TIFFs?
Only the first page converts, because a JPEG holds exactly one image and there is nowhere for the rest to go. Multi-page TIFFs are common from document scanners and fax software, and for those the useful target is PDF, which keeps every page in one file.
Is the quality loss noticeable?
Rarely on screen, and it depends what you do next. JPEG discards fine detail the eye is poor at noticing, which is invisible when viewing and becomes visible after heavy editing — raised shadows and strong contrast curves both reveal compression artifacts that were not apparent before.