Convert TIFF to JPG

Detailed guidance

Why these files keep turning up

TIFF survives because three professions needed it: printing, scanning and archiving. It can hold a page stack, layers, an alpha mask, a print colour space, and a bit depth far beyond screen, all without lossy compression, and a scanner can write it without any clever software in the loop. The consequence is a file that no ordinary viewer speaks. People discover this at the worst moment, when a scanned document has to be attached to a form or dropped into a chat, and the receiving end simply refuses. Converting a batch of them takes a minute once you know the trick.

The limits worth knowing before you trust the output

A JPG holds one flat picture at eight bits per channel in a screen colour space, so a conversion is a series of reductions rather than a repackaging. Multi-page files lose everything after the first page. Layers are flattened. Print colour spaces are mapped, sometimes visibly. Very high resolutions are accepted up to about forty megapixels, above which the browser gives up decoding, so a large archival scan may need downscaling first, which this site handles on the resize page. Nothing of this is hidden: the card reports the real delivered size and count.

A sensible order for archival work

If the TIFF is the only surviving copy of something, treat it as the master and never overwrite it. Generate a screen copy at moderate quality for browsing and sharing, and a second high-quality copy for anything that may be printed later. Name both after the source with a suffix that says which is which, because a folder of scans from a decades-old machine will otherwise become unreadable to whoever inherits it. Work in modest batches so each result gets a glance, since a mis-decoded page from an old scanner is easy to miss.

When the archive deserves PNG instead

Documents with small text, line drawings, stamps, and anything you expect to read at full zoom should land on PNG. A JPG at moderate quality softens character edges in exactly the places where an old typewritten letter is already hard to make out, and the lossless container keeps the strokes crisp. The size penalty is real but usually modest compared with the TIFF you started from, and legibility is the entire point of digitising a document.

Reading the result honestly

Two checks catch almost every problem. Open the converted picture at one hundred percent and confirm text and edges survived, then compare the delivered size against the source: a JPG many times smaller than a huge TIFF is normal and expected, while a suspiciously tiny output usually means the decode grabbed an empty page rather than the scan itself. Both numbers are printed on the result card, so you never have to guess which file is which.