What is a TIFF file?
A TIFF is what scanners, fax gateways, records systems and print shops write by default. It's also a format almost nothing on your phone will open. That gap is why you're here. 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, and each one is 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 .tif can carry a 1-bit black-and-white fax page and a 16-bit colour photo side by side.
That matters the moment you convert one. A forty-page loan file arrives as a single file, with no outward sign that there are forty pages inside. A converter that reads only the first entry hands you one image and never mentions the other thirty-nine. So the first question to ask of any TIFF converter is whether it reads the whole chain. This one does: every page comes out as its own JPG.
JPG is the format everything already opens
JPG and JPEG are the same format with two spellings, which is why "tiff to jpeg" and "tiff to jpg" are the same search. Every browser, phone, email client and upload form has read it since the 1990s. It holds one image per file, it's lossy, and it's small. Those three properties are the exact opposite of TIFF's. That's why a TIFF is what you archive and a JPG is what you send.
The support gap is deliberate. TIFF is really a toolkit of dozens of optional compression schemes and bit depths, and shipping all of them inside a browser is a security surface nobody wanted. Most desktop browsers and nearly every phone won't show a TIFF, though a Mac's built-in viewer usually will. That's why a scan that looks fine on the office 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 touch a server.
Peek at the header → count and decode every page → re-encode each page as JPEG. The first 1 MB of the file tells the tool what the file really is, its byte order (II for little-endian, MM for big), the first page's size, and sometimes the page count. The full decode gets the real page count and the pixels. Each page is then written out as its own JPG at the quality you picked.
Step one is a peek. A TIFF starts with two bytes that say which way round its numbers are stored, then a version number: 42 for a normal TIFF, 43 for BigTIFF. BigTIFF is a 64-bit variant for files over 4 GB that no browser can decode, so the tool refuses it by name instead of failing halfway through.
Step two is where the page count firms up. The peek can only count pages if the whole chain fits inside that first megabyte. In a real multi-page scan the later entries sit past page one's pixel data. So a multi-page TIFF shows "reading pages…" for a moment rather than promising a filename it might have to change. Once the chain is read, the count goes through the limits before a single page is drawn. A 2,001-page file is refused at that point, not after minutes of work.
Step three is a real 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. That's also why the quality is a slider you can see, not a default someone picked 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 header peek reads it as 36.2 MB and 2,480 × 3,508 px, then the list shows "Reading pages…" while the chain is walked. A moment later it knows there are 12 pages, counts up through "Converting page 7 of 12…", and lands on 12 JPGs named contract-scan-page-01.jpg through contract-scan-page-12.jpg. "Download all 12 JPGs" saves them as contract-scan-jpg.zip. Nothing was uploaded to make any of that.
What your files come out named
Naming is most of the work in a multi-page conversion. It's worth knowing the rules before sixteen files land in one folder.
| What you drop in | Pages | What you get back |
|---|---|---|
scan.tif | 1 | scan.jpg |
fax.tiff | 9 | fax-page-1.jpg … fax-page-9.jpg |
contract-scan.tiff | 12 | contract-scan-page-01.jpg … contract-scan-page-12.jpg |
scan.tif, scan.tiff and Scan.TIF in one batch | 1 each | scan.jpg, scan-2.jpg, Scan-3.jpg |
Invoice 2026.TIFF | 1 | Invoice 2026.jpg |
scan.v2.tif | 1 | scan.v2.jpg |
A one-page file keeps its own name, with no pointless -page-1 on a document that has one page. A multi-page file is numbered in the order the pages sit in the chain. The number is zero-padded to the width of the page count: nine pages give -page-1 through -page-9, twelve give -page-01 through -page-12. That padding decides whether a folder reads in page order. File managers sort names as text, so without it page 10 lands between page 1 and page 2.
Name clashes are checked across the whole batch, and the check ignores case, so nothing silently overwrites anything. Only image extensions get stripped. That's why a version suffix like .v2 survives instead of being mistaken for a file type.
"Download all" saves one ZIP: <name>-jpg.zip when every JPG came from one TIFF, tiff-to-jpg.zip when they came from several. The JPGs go in as they are, not squeezed a second time, so even a big ZIP builds in a moment. One file beats a burst of downloads more than it sounds. Some browsers stop to ask before a page saves several files at once, and some phone browsers keep the first file and drop the rest. Every page still has its own link if you only want page four.
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 use when they write a JPEG themselves. It sits at the point where the file is several times smaller than a lossless copy and almost nothing visible is lost.
| Quality | Use it for | What the tool tells you |
|---|---|---|
| 100 | Almost nothing | "100% files are much bigger for a difference almost nobody can see." |
| 92 (default) | Documents, scans, photos | Nothing. It's the right answer. |
| 85–91 | Documents you want a bit smaller | Nothing |
| 61–84 | Photos nobody needs to read text from | Nothing |
| 1–60 | Nothing you plan to read | "At 60% the text in a scan goes blotchy. Try 85 or higher if the TIFF is a document." |
JPEG damage shows up first on 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 whole reason documents want 85 or higher while a photo survives 80 without complaint.
Moving the slider re-converts everything already in the batch, even a file that's halfway through. 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 scanners default to multi-page TIFF because it's lossless and keeps a document together as one file. Then you need to attach page four to an email and find that nothing on your laptop will show you page four.
Upload forms that refuse the file. Insurance claims, visa applications, expense systems, marketplace listings and court e-filing portals very often take JPG, PNG and PDF, and nothing else. A JPG is the shortest path to a file the form will accept.
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 multi-page TIFFs, which is most of the reason "multi page TIFF to JPG" is a search people make at all.
Every one of those is a thirty-second job. It shouldn't come with an account, a daily conversion cap, or a size wall that clears the moment you pay monthly. That pattern is Big Software's favourite: take a basic format conversion, meter it, and sell the meter back to you. Here you open the page, drop the file, and leave with your JPGs.
Where TIFF to JPG conversion goes wrong
Camera RAW files look like TIFFs and aren't. A .CR2, .NEF, .ARW or .DNG is built on the TIFF container, so it starts with the same bytes. A converter that trusts those bytes can open one and hand you the small preview the camera tucked inside, at a fraction of the real resolution. 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. The tool believes the file's first bytes over its name. A PNG renamed to .tif is refused as a PNG, with a pointer to the image format converter. A JPG wearing a .tif name is told to rename itself, because there's nothing to convert.
Sideways pages. Some scanners save a page rotated by setting a "turn this 90°" tag instead of turning the pixels. That tag doesn't survive the trip, so a page like that can come out sideways. The pixels are all there. Turn it with rotate image.
Transparency. TIFF can hold an alpha channel and JPEG can't, so transparent areas have to land on something. White is the right answer; black is what you get when a converter forgets. This one flattens onto white pixel by pixel.
Print size. The pixel grid comes across exactly: a 2,480 × 3,508 page stays 2,480 × 3,508. The TIFF's tags don't, including the one that says "300 DPI". A print dialog may then assume a much lower DPI and offer to print your A4 page at poster size. Set the size 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 per batch. Those are generous for an image tool because uncompressed scans are huge: a 600 DPI colour A4 page is about 100 MB before compression. They exist because everything is decoded in your browser's memory, and a phone runs out before a laptop does. A very large page also earns a note. A 9,933 × 14,043 scan is flagged as a 139.5 MP image that "can take a few seconds on a phone".
Related image tools
If your twelve-page scan should stay one document instead of twelve files, TIFF to PDF is the better tool: same input, one PDF out. Going the other way, JPG to PDF stitches loose pages back together, and PDF to JPG does for PDFs what this page does for TIFFs.
For other files that won't open: HEIC to JPG for iPhone photos, JFIF to JPG for the odd extension some downloads arrive with, and WebP to JPG for images saved from the web. If your JPGs are still too big to email, the image compressor takes it from there, and the image resizer handles a scan that has simply too many pixels.
Frequently asked questions
What's the difference between .tif and .tiff?
Nothing. They're the same format with two extensions, left over from when Windows allowed only three characters after the dot. So "tif to jpg" and "tiff to jpg" are the same job. Both are accepted here, and so is the rarer .tff.
Does converting change the resolution of my scan?
No. 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 the JPEG is written fresh, without the TIFF's metadata. If you're printing, set the size in the print dialog. 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 pick the file. That's the whole procedure. It works because the conversion runs in the page, not on a server: your phone can't display a TIFF, but it can run the decoder. Big multi-page scans are slower on a phone than on 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 file's JPGs appear as it finishes. The batch tops out at 2,000 JPGs. A single file with more pages than that has to be split first.
What happens if one file in the batch won't decode?
That file gets its own message and the rest of the batch keeps going. The usual cause is an unusual compression scheme. Re-save it from whatever made it as an uncompressed or LZW TIFF, then drop it in again.
Can I turn the JPGs back into a TIFF?
You can make a TIFF from them, but you can't get back what the JPEG encoder threw away. Keep the original TIFF if it's the archival copy. The JPGs are the version you share, not a replacement.
Do I need an account, a plugin, or a desktop install?
No. No sign-up, no trial that expires, no watermark on page two. The conversion runs in the tab you already have open, and closing it clears everything. Microapp earns its money elsewhere, and 10% of every dollar goes to charity, off the top, audited quarterly.