Where TIFF files come from
TIFF is the format of scanners, archives, and serious photography. A flatbed scanner at full quality, a Photoshop print master, or a stock-photo download can each produce a TIFF of tens or hundreds of megabytes — wonderful for preservation, miserable for email. Most inboxes cap attachments around 25 MB, many web forms accept far less, and no browser can display a TIFF. Converting TIFF to JPG turns that archival giant into a lightweight file that opens everywhere, while your original stays safely untouched.
You will meet TIFFs from document and photo scanners defaulting to maximum fidelity, designers handing over print-ready masters, medical and legal archives where lossless storage is mandatory, and older cameras offering TIFF as their best-quality mode. They are huge for good reasons — but none of those reasons help when you simply need to email a scan.
How this converter reads TIFF files
No browser decodes TIFF natively, so an ordinary web converter would have to upload your file to a server to read it. This page ships with its own compact TIFF decoder, written in JavaScript and running entirely on your device. It understands the baseline variants you are most likely to meet: uncompressed, PackBits, and LZW compression; 8-bit and 16-bit samples; grayscale, RGB, and palette images; in little-endian and big-endian byte orders.
The pipeline is simple: your file is read into memory, decoded to raw pixels, drawn to a canvas, and encoded as a JPG you download. If your TIFF uses an exotic variant the decoder does not cover — JPEG-compressed TIFFs are the usual culprit — you get a clear error instead of a broken download, with advice to re-export as uncompressed or LZW TIFF.
Why convert TIFF to JPG
The math is compelling: a 48 MB scanned TIFF routinely becomes a 400 KB JPG at high quality — over 99% smaller — with detail that looks identical on screen. Convert when emailing scans, uploading documents to web forms, sharing archival photos with family, or viewing images on a phone that has never heard of TIFF.
Keeping maximum quality
This page defaults to quality 0.92, because TIFF sources deserve a gentler touch — at 0.92 and above, artifacts are effectively invisible even in fine scan detail. Keep your TIFF as the untouched master and convert only the copy you share; JPG is lossy, so re-saving a JPG again and again slowly degrades it.