TIFF to JPG

TIFF is the workhorse of scanners, fax servers, document archives and professional photography. It is flexible and lossless, which also makes it large and awkward to share: phones rarely preview it, browsers will not display it and email systems choke on 80 MB attachments. Converting to JPG produces small files that open everywhere.

Where your TIFF came from matters

A TIFF from a flatbed scanner is usually an RGB photo, often with LZW compression. A fax or a multipage document scan is commonly black and white, compressed with the CCITT fax standard, and may contain dozens of pages. Professional photo TIFFs can be 16 bits per channel. The converter reads all of these: uncompressed, LZW, PackBits, Deflate, JPEG-in-TIFF and Group 3 and 4 fax compression. Very unusual variants such as JPEG 2000 inside TIFF are reported as unreadable rather than converted wrongly.

Multi-page files

With “Convert every page” switched on, which is the default here, a ten-page TIFF gives ten JPGs named after the file and the page number. They are offered together as a .zip, and the combined “Download all” button collects the pages of several TIFFs at once. Some TIFFs also hold small preview copies of each page; those are recognised and left out so you do not get duplicates.

Choosing JPG or PNG

JPG suits photographs and color scans: a 25 MB scan easily drops to 2 or 3 MB at 90 percent quality without visible change. Text documents are different. Black lettering on white paper shows faint halos in JPG, and a PNG of the same page is both sharper and frequently smaller. You can switch to PNG in the same tool, or use TIFF to PNG for a lossless conversion of every page.

Size and resolution

Scans are often far larger than needed for sharing. A letter-size page at 600 dpi is about 5100 × 6600 pixels; for reading on screen, 1500 to 2000 pixels on the long side is plenty. Switch on the size limit to scale every page down during conversion, which shrinks the files much more than lowering the quality.

Colors and transparency

CMYK TIFFs from print workflows are converted to RGB, the color model of JPG files. TIFFs with an alpha channel get the background color you choose for transparent areas. If the document needs to stay a single file with all pages, convert it to a PDF instead with TIFF to PDF.

Privacy for sensitive scans

Contracts, medical letters and ID scans often arrive as TIFF. Everything here happens in your browser, so the pages are never uploaded. For the opposite direction, turning photos into TIFF for an archive or print shop, see JPG to TIFF.

Checking a converted document

Open the first and last page of the result and zoom in on small print, signatures and stamps. If the text looks fuzzy, the scan was probably made at a low resolution, or the size limit was set too tight; convert again without the limit. If gray backgrounds appear blotchy, raise the quality to 92 percent or switch to PNG. Count the pages in the .zip against the original: a damaged page in the TIFF produces an error message for that file instead of silently missing pages, so you always know whether the whole document came through.