TIFF is where scanners, photo archives and prepress work keep their images: lossless, with high bit depth and room for colour profiles. That makes the files large. An uncompressed A4 colour scan at 300 dpi is 2480 × 3508 pixels and about 26 MB, too much for most e-mail attachments and upload forms. Many phone galleries and web services do not display TIFF at all. As a JPG the same picture is typically a tenth of the size or less and opens anywhere.
A format from the scanner era
Aldus published the first TIFF specification in 1986 to get the makers of early desktop scanners to agree on one file format. Revision 6.0 from June 1992 is still the current one; Adobe has owned the specification since it acquired Aldus. TIFF is a container of tagged fields rather than one fixed layout, so a .tif file can hold almost anything: 1-bit fax pages compressed with CCITT Group 4, RGB or CMYK photos with 8, 16 or 32 bits per channel, several pages, transparency, even Photoshop layers. Classic TIFF uses 32-bit file offsets, which caps a file at 4 GB; larger files use the BigTIFF variant.
That flexibility is why TIFF is popular for archiving and why a JPG is often needed for sharing.
What our converter does with a TIFF file
- Compression: conversion runs on our own servers in the Czech Republic. All common TIFF compressions are read: none, LZW, ZIP, PackBits, JPEG and CCITT fax.
- Only the first page. A multi-page TIFF (fax, scanned document) gives one JPG of page 1. To keep every page, convert the TIFF to PDF instead; that conversion takes all pages.
- Layers are flattened. Photoshop saves layered TIFFs with a merged composite image, and that composite is what you get. The layers themselves are not kept.
- 8 bits per channel. JPEG cannot store 16-bit or 32-bit data, so tonal values are reduced to 8 bits. For viewing and printing this is fine; for further heavy editing keep the TIFF.
- CMYK stays CMYK. We do not convert colour spaces. A CMYK TIFF becomes a CMYK JPG with its colour profile. Browsers display it, but some upload forms and older programs reject CMYK JPGs or show wrong colours. If you need RGB for the web, convert the colour space in an image editor first.
- Transparency becomes white, as JPG has no alpha channel.
- Resolution is unchanged. Pixel dimensions and the dpi value stay as they were; quality is 90. Images up to 30 000 pixels per side are accepted.
- Metadata: the ICC colour profile, XMP and IPTC captions carry over. Camera EXIF data stored in the TIFF's own tags is generally not copied into the JPG.
Common problems and how to fix them
Multi-page TIFF converted to just one JPG
JPG holds a single image. Convert the file to PDF to keep all pages in one document, or split the TIFF into pages in an image editor before converting.
Colours look wrong after converting a CMYK TIFF
The JPG is still CMYK. Programs without colour management interpret CMYK poorly and show over-saturated or inverted colours. Convert to RGB with the correct profile in an editor, then convert to JPG.
Black-and-white scan became large and grey
A 1-bit fax or document scan compresses extremely well in TIFF. In JPG it turns into greyscale with soft edges around the letters and the file can grow. For text scans, PDF or PNG is usually the better target; JPG is meant for photos.
TIFF won't open on a phone or in the browser
Browsers other than Safari generally do not display TIFF, and many Android galleries skip it. JPG is the safe choice for viewing on any device.
Other ways to do it
- Windows: open the TIFF in Paint and choose Save as › JPEG picture. Paint shows only the first page of a multi-page file.
- macOS: Preview, File › Export, format JPEG.
- Photoshop, GIMP, Affinity: full control over CMYK to RGB conversion and sharpening.
The converter helps when you have a folder of scans to send and no editor at hand, when you are on Linux or a Chromebook, or when the TIFF came from an unusual source such as a microscope or a document scanner. Up to 10 files at once, 100 MB each, results in one ZIP.
TIFF and JPG compared
| TIFF | JPG | |
|---|---|---|
| Compression | none or lossless (LZW, ZIP), optionally JPEG | lossy |
| Bit depth | 1 to 32 bits per channel | 8 bits |
| Colour spaces | grey, RGB, CMYK, Lab and more | grey, RGB, CMYK (limited support) |
| Pages and layers | yes | no |
| Typical use | scanning, archiving, print | sharing, web, e-mail |
More: the Library of Congress description of TIFF 6.0 and our pages on the TIFF and JPG formats. Camera raw files go to JPG via CR2 to JPG or NEF to JPG.