Convert TIFF to JPG

TIFF is the format of scanners, print shops, museums and professional cameras. It is excellent for archiving and a nuisance for anything else: a single scanned page at 300 dpi is often 25 MB, Chrome and Firefox will not display it, and most upload forms and email previews refuse it. A JPG of the same scan is typically a twentieth of the size and opens everywhere.

Only Safari can read TIFF on its own, so this page carries a TIFF decoder, UTIF.js, which is part of the site and runs in your tab. It handles the compression schemes real TIFFs use: none, LZW, Deflate (ZIP), PackBits, JPEG-in-TIFF, and CCITT Group 3 and 4 for black-and-white faxes and document scans. 16-bit files from scanners and raw converters are reduced to 8 bits per channel, which is what JPG stores.

A multi-page TIFF, such as a fax or a scanned contract, becomes a JPG of its first page here. To keep every page, the TIFF to PDF page turns each one into a PDF page instead. Layers and alpha channels from Photoshop-saved TIFFs are flattened onto the background colour in the options.

Your scans often hold exactly the documents you would least like copied to a stranger’s server: IDs, medical letters, signed agreements, family photos. Nothing here is uploaded; the decoding and the JPG encoding both happen on your device, and the page keeps working offline once loaded.

Camera TIFFs are a separate case from scans. Raw converters such as Lightroom, Capture One and darktable export 16-bit TIFFs of 70 MB and more for editing. Turning one of those into a JPG for sharing is fine, but keep the TIFF as your master copy, since every later edit on the JPG loses a little quality.

Colour documents scanned for an office archive are the most common TIFF people need to share. A bank statement, a tax form or a school report scanned at 300 dpi comes out around 2500 by 3300 pixels. As a JPG at quality 85 that page is usually 400 to 900 KB, small enough to attach several to one email, and still sharp enough to print or read on a phone.