Convert Image to TIFF

Expect very large files

This is the first thing to know, because the download will otherwise surprise you.

The TIFF produced here is uncompressed. Every pixel is stored at full size with nothing thrown away, which is exactly why print and archive workflows ask for it — and it means the arithmetic is simple and unforgiving.

A TIFF this tool produces is roughly four bytes for every pixel. So:

A 12-megapixel photo from a phone becomes about 48 MB. A 24-megapixel photo from a camera becomes about 96 MB. A 300 DPI A4 scan is around 35 MB. A small 1000 by 1000 web image is about 4 MB.

The same photographs as JPEGs would be two or three megabytes. That is a twenty-fold increase, and it is the point rather than a fault — but it has consequences worth planning for: a batch of twenty photos is a gigabyte, most email systems will refuse a single file, and a large batch takes real time and memory to produce because the work happens on your own device.

So convert at the end of your workflow, not the start. Do your cropping, colour work and resizing first, then produce the TIFF as the final deliverable.

Why anything still asks for TIFF

Worth understanding, because it tells you whether you actually need it.

Print and publishing. Commercial printers and magazine production have used TIFF as the standard delivery format for decades. It carries no compression artefacts, and it handles the colour and layer information that print workflows need. If a printer has asked for TIFF, they mean it, and sending a JPEG instead will get it sent back.

Archiving. National libraries and archives specify uncompressed TIFF for long-term preservation, for two reasons: nothing is discarded, so the file is a faithful record; and the format is old, stable, thoroughly documented and readable by everything. A file you can still open in eighty years matters more than a small one.

Scanning and document management. Many scanners produce TIFF by default, and a lot of document management, records and legal systems expect it — including multi-page TIFF for scanned documents.

Scientific and medical imaging, where measurement is taken from the pixels and compression would alter the data.

And when you do not need it: anything going on a website, into an email, onto social media, into a slide deck or a Word document. TIFF is wrong for all of those — it is large, and many of them will refuse it outright. If nobody has specifically asked for TIFF, you almost certainly want something else.

Transparency is preserved

A practical detail that separates this from the other uncompressed format.

The TIFF written here includes an alpha channel, so a transparent PNG converts with its transparency intact. That matters for a logo, a cut-out product shot or anything that will be placed over a background in a layout.

If you also need a BMP, note the difference: Convert Image to BMP produces 24-bit BMP, which has no alpha channel at all, so transparency is lost there. Between the two uncompressed formats, TIFF is the one to choose whenever transparency is involved — as well as being the one print and archive workflows actually ask for.

Converting several at once

A TIFF request is rarely for one file, so add as many as you want and they are converted in one pass, each appearing in a list as it completes. More than one comes back as a ZIP, with the original filenames and the extension changed.

Given the file sizes, a practical suggestion: work in batches of ten or twenty rather than a hundred. The conversion runs in your browser and holds each image in memory while it works, so a very large batch of high-resolution photographs is asking a lot of the tab.

What conversion cannot do

Two honest points, because "convert to TIFF" sounds like an upgrade and is not.

It cannot recover what a JPEG lost. If your source is a JPEG, the compression damage already happened when it was saved — the blocks and edge haloes are baked into the pixels. Converting to TIFF preserves those flaws perfectly in a much larger file. It does not add detail back, and it never can.

That is still worth doing when a workflow demands TIFF, and it prevents further loss from that point on. But always convert from the best original you have — a camera raw file or the original scan rather than a JPEG copy that has been emailed around.

It does not add print colour handling. The output is RGB. If your printer has asked for CMYK, that is a colour conversion rather than a format conversion, and it needs proper software with the right colour profile — doing it wrong shifts every colour in the image. Ask them for their profile and use an application that can apply it.

Everything happens on your own device: no upload, no watermark, no account and no size limit beyond what your browser can hold.

Related tools

Convert Image to BMP is the other uncompressed format, for the older software that demands it — and it does not keep transparency. Convert Image Format handles the everyday formats, which is what you want unless TIFF has specifically been requested. Compress Image is the opposite operation, for when the file needs to be small rather than faithful.