What a TIFF file actually is
A TIFF is the format scanners, fax gateways, records systems and print shops reach for by default, and it's the format almost nothing on your phone will open. That gap is why you're reading this. Converting TIFF to JPG closes it in a few seconds.
TIFF is a container, not a picture
TIFF stands for Tagged Image File Format, and the "tagged" part is the whole story. A TIFF doesn't hold one image the way a JPG does. It holds a chain of entries — each one a page, with its own width, height, colour model and compression. The chain is called the IFD chain, and each link points at the next one. A single .tif can carry a 1-bit black-and-white fax page and a 16-bit colour photograph side by side.
That matters the moment you try to convert one. A forty-page loan file arrives as a single file with no outward sign that there are forty pages inside it. Plenty of converters read the first entry, hand you one image, and never mention the other thirty-nine. If you've ever converted a scan and wondered where the rest of the document went, that's what happened.
JPG is the format everything already opens
JPG — or JPEG, same format, two spellings, which is why "tiff to jpeg" and "tiff to jpg" are the same search — has been readable by every browser, phone, email client and upload form since the 1990s. It's one image per file, it's lossy, and it's small. Those three properties are the exact opposite of TIFF's, and they're why a TIFF is what you archive and a JPG is what you send.
The support gap is deliberate, not an oversight. TIFF is really a toolkit of dozens of optional compression schemes and bit depths, and shipping all of them inside a browser was a security surface nobody wanted. Safari and macOS Preview still open TIFFs. Chrome, Firefox and Android don't. That's why a scan that looks fine on a Mac looks broken the second you email it to someone on a phone.
How TIFF to JPG conversion works
Three steps, and none of them involve a server.
Read the header → decode every page → re-encode each page as JPEG. The first 1 MB of the file tells the tool the byte order (II for little-endian, MM for big), the first page's pixel size, and sometimes the page count. The full decode gets the actual pixels. Each page is then written out as its own JPG at the quality you picked.
Step one is a peek. TIFF files begin with two bytes saying which way round the numbers are stored, then the version — 42 for a normal TIFF, 43 for BigTIFF, which is a 64-bit variant for files over 4 GB that no browser can decode and the tool rejects by name rather than failing halfway through.
Step two is where the page count firms up. The header peek can only count pages if the whole chain happens to fit in that first megabyte, and in a real multi-page scan the later entries sit past page one's pixel data. So a multi-page TIFF says "reading pages" for a moment instead of promising a filename it would have to change. That's not slowness — it's the tool refusing to guess.
Step three is a genuine re-encode. TIFF is normally lossless and JPG never is, so this is not a rename. Every pixel is decoded and written again through the JPEG encoder, which is also why the quality is a slider you can see instead of a default someone chose for you.
A worked example. Drop in contract-scan.tiff — 38,000,000 bytes, twelve pages, each page 2,480 × 3,508 pixels, which is A4 at 300 DPI. The tool reads it as 36.2 MB, 12 pages, "2,480 × 3,508 px", and plans 12 JPGs named contract-scan-page-01.jpg through contract-scan-page-12.jpg. Nothing was uploaded to produce that plan, and nothing is uploaded to produce the files.
What your files come out named
Naming is most of the work in a multi-page conversion, so it's worth knowing the rules before you download sixteen files into one folder.
| What you drop in | Pages | What you get back |
|---|---|---|
scan.tif | 1 | scan.jpg |
contract-scan.tiff | 12 | contract-scan-page-01.jpg … contract-scan-page-12.jpg |
scan.tif and scan.tiff in one batch | 1 each | scan.jpg and scan-2.jpg |
Invoice 2026.TIFF | 1 | Invoice 2026.jpg |
scan.v2.tif | 1 | scan.v2.jpg |
A one-page file keeps its own name. There's no pointless -page-1 on a document that has one page. A multi-page file gets numbered in the order the pages appear in the chain, and the number is zero-padded to the width of the page count: twelve pages give -page-01 through -page-12, nine pages give -page-1 through -page-9. That padding is the difference between a folder that reads in page order and one where page 10 sits between page 1 and page 2, because file managers sort names as text rather than as numbers.
Collisions are handled across the whole batch, not per file, and the check ignores case — so scan.tif, scan.tiff and Scan.TIF in the same batch come out as scan.jpg, scan-2.jpg and Scan-3.jpg. Nothing silently overwrites anything. Only image extensions get stripped, which is why a version suffix like .v2 survives instead of being mistaken for a file type.
"Download all" saves each JPG as a separate download rather than a ZIP, staggered slightly so the browser doesn't treat the burst as a pop-up. You may get one permission prompt about multiple downloads the first time. Say yes and the rest land in your downloads folder.
Choosing a JPEG quality
The default is 92, and for almost every scan the right move is to leave it there. 92 is what browsers themselves use when they write a JPEG, and it sits at the point where the file is several times smaller than a lossless copy with almost nothing given up.
| Quality | Use it for | What the tool tells you |
|---|---|---|
| 100 | Almost nothing | Warns you: much bigger files for a difference almost nobody can see |
| 92 (default) | Everything — documents, scans, photos | Nothing. It's the right answer. |
| 85 | Photographic scans you want smaller | Nothing |
| 61–84 | Images nobody needs to read text from | Nothing |
| 60 and below | Nothing you plan to read | Warns you: the text in a scan goes blotchy |
Where JPEG damage shows up first is high-contrast edges — black text on white, engineering drawings, signatures, anything with sharp lines. Those pick up a faint halo long before a photograph looks wrong. That's the entire reason documents want 85 or higher while a photo survives 80 without complaint.
Moving the slider re-converts everything already in the batch, so you can compare two settings on the same scan without starting over.
When you'll need to convert TIFF to JPG
The scanner at work. Office and department scanners default to multi-page TIFF because it's lossless and it keeps a document together as one file. Then you need to attach page four to an email and discover nothing on your laptop will show you page four.
Uploads that refuse the file. Insurance claims, visa applications, expense systems, marketplace listings, court e-filing portals — a great many of them accept JPG, PNG and PDF, and nothing else. Converting TIFF to JPG is the shortest path to a file the form will take.
Old archives. Museums, libraries, newspapers and land registries stored decades of material as TIFF because it was the sane archival choice. Working with any of it today means making viewable copies and leaving the originals alone.
Faxes. Yes, still. Fax-to-email gateways deliver as multi-page TIFF, which is most of the reason multi page TIFF to JPG is a search people make at all.
Where TIFF to JPG conversion goes wrong
Camera RAW files are TIFF-shaped and aren't TIFFs. A .CR2, .NEF, .ARW or .DNG uses the TIFF container, so it has the same first bytes, and a lot of converters will cheerfully open one and hand you the small preview image the camera embedded — at a fraction of the real resolution, with the wrong colours. This tool names the problem instead: "This is a camera RAW file. It uses the TIFF container but holds sensor data." Export a TIFF or JPG from your photo app first.
Files that aren't what their name says. A PNG renamed to .tif gets rejected as a PNG, with a pointer to the image format converter. A JPG wearing a .tif name gets told to just rename itself, because there's genuinely nothing to convert.
Transparency turns white, not black. TIFF supports an alpha channel and JPEG has none, so transparent areas have to land on something. White is the right answer and black is what you get when a converter forgets to handle it. This one composites onto white by hand, pixel by pixel.
Metadata doesn't survive. The pixel grid comes across exactly — a 2,480 × 3,508 page stays 2,480 × 3,508 — but the TIFF's tags don't, including the "this is 300 DPI" one. A print tool may then assume 72 DPI and offer to print your A4 page at poster size. All the pixels are there; set the DPI wherever you print from.
Limits, and why they exist. 100 MB per file, 400 MB per batch, 50 files at a time, 2,000 JPGs planned per batch. Those numbers are generous by image-tool standards because uncompressed scans are genuinely enormous — a 600 DPI colour A4 page runs to around 100 MB before compression. They exist because everything is decoded in your browser's memory, and a phone will run out before a laptop does. A really large page also earns a note: a 9,933 × 14,043 scan is flagged as a 139.5 MP image that will take a few seconds.
Related image tools
If your twelve-page scan should stay one document rather than becoming twelve files, TIFF to PDF is the better tool — same input, one PDF out. Going the other direction, JPG to PDF stitches loose pages back together, and PDF to JPG does for PDFs what this page does for TIFFs.
For the other formats that show up when a file won't open: HEIC to JPG for iPhone photos, JFIF to JPG for the odd extension some email clients produce, and WebP to JPG for images saved from the web. If your JPGs come out larger than you want to email, the image compressor takes it from there, and the image resizer handles a scan that's simply too big in pixels.
Frequently asked questions
What's the difference between .tif and .tiff?
Nothing. They're the same format with two extensions, left over from the days when Windows allowed only three characters after the dot, so a tif to jpg conversion and a tiff to jpg conversion are the same operation. Both are accepted here, and so is the rarer .tff. The extension isn't what the tool trusts anyway — it reads the file's first bytes and believes those over the name.
Does converting change the resolution or DPI of my scan?
The pixels are untouched: a page that comes in at 2,480 × 3,508 goes out at 2,480 × 3,508. What doesn't survive is the DPI tag, because a re-encode through the browser's canvas writes fresh JPEG data without the TIFF's metadata. If you're printing, set the DPI in the print dialog or the layout app. If you're emailing or uploading, nothing will notice.
How do I convert a TIFF on my phone?
Open this page in your phone's browser and drop the file in. That's the whole procedure, and it works precisely because the conversion happens in the page rather than on a server — your phone can't display a TIFF, but it can run the decoder. Large multi-page scans are slower on a phone than a laptop, since a phone has less memory to decode into.
Can I convert several TIFFs at once?
Up to 50 files in one go. They convert one after another rather than all at once, which keeps a batch of big scans from exhausting your browser's memory, and each one appears as it finishes. The batch ceiling is 2,000 JPGs — if one file alone would blow past that, convert it on its own.
Why is my JPG so much smaller than the TIFF?
Because that's the trade you made. A TIFF is usually stored uncompressed or with LZW, both lossless, so it keeps every pixel exactly. JPEG throws away detail your eye is bad at noticing. A tenfold size drop on a colour scan is normal and usually invisible. If the JPG looks noticeably worse, the quality slider is set too low — put it back to 92.
Can I turn the JPGs back into a TIFF?
You can produce a TIFF from them, but you can't recover what the JPEG encoder discarded. The conversion only runs one way in a meaningful sense. Keep the original TIFF if it's the archival copy — the JPGs are the shareable version, not a replacement.
Do I need an account, a plugin, or a desktop install?
No. No sign-up, no trial that expires, no daily conversion cap that clears if you upgrade, no watermark on page two. The pattern this tool exists against is the one where a basic format conversion is the bait for a subscription — where you upload your medical records to a stranger's server to get page one back, and the other eleven pages need a card on file. Converting a file you already own shouldn't cost a monthly fee or a mailing list signup. Microapp does earn money elsewhere, and 10% of every dollar of it goes to charity, off the top, audited quarterly.