TIFF to JPG Converter

How the TIFF And BMP Converter works

TIFF and BMP are the formats that come out of scanners, older cameras, medical and lab equipment, fax software and Windows applications from the 1990s. Both store large, often uncompressed images that are perfect for archiving and awkward for everything else. Most browsers cannot show a TIFF at all, email services strip or block them, and a single A4 scan at 600 DPI can weigh 100 MB.

How the TIFF to JPG converter works

BMP is simple: your browser can decode it natively, so the tool draws it straight onto a canvas.

TIFF is a container with dozens of variations, and browsers other than Safari do not read it. The first time you drop a TIFF, the page loads a small open-source decoder, UTIF.js with pako for Deflate data, about 80 KB in total. It reads the file's image directory, decodes the first full-size page into RGBA pixels, and the tool draws that onto a canvas. From there the canvas is saved as JPG or PNG, exactly as for any other image.

The decoder handles the TIFF compressions you will meet in practice:

JPG or PNG?

JPG is right for photos, scanned prints and anything with continuous tone. At quality 90 a 24 MB uncompressed TIFF photo usually becomes 2–4 MB with no visible change. Quality 80 roughly halves that again and is still fine for screens and email.

PNG is lossless. Choose it for scanned text, line art, diagrams, screenshots saved as BMP and anything you will edit further. PNG keeps transparency; JPG has none, so transparent areas are filled with white.

What gets lost

TIFF can hold things a JPG or PNG cannot:

• Multiple pages. A multi-page TIFF, common from fax and document scanners, converts its first full-size page only. The stats tell you how many images the file holds. To get every page, use a scanner app or a PDF tool that reads TIFF.
• 16 bits per channel. High-bit-depth scans are reduced to 8 bits per channel. That is plenty for viewing and printing, but keep the original for heavy editing.
• CMYK colour. Print-ready CMYK TIFFs are converted to RGB without a colour profile, so colours may shift. Convert in a colour-managed editor if exact colour matters.
• Layers and metadata. Photoshop layers, EXIF, IPTC and ICC profiles are not carried over.

Why BMP files are so big

BMP stores every pixel with no compression at all. A 1920 × 1080 BMP at 24 bits is about 6 MB; the same image as PNG is often under 1 MB for a screenshot and as JPG around 400 KB for a photo. Some old Windows software also writes 8-bit palette BMPs, which convert fine here.

Tips and pitfalls

Huge scans. A 600 DPI A3 colour scan is roughly 7000 × 10000 pixels, about 280 MB once decoded. Most desktop browsers manage it; phones may run out of memory. Scan at 300 DPI if the file only needs to be read on screen.

File will not open? Some TIFFs use rare variants such as tiled JPEG 2000 or 32-bit float data. The tool says when it cannot read a file instead of producing a broken image.

Check the extension. Files ending in .tif and .tiff are the same format. A .dib file is a BMP.

How to read the result

The stats give the source type, its pixel size and file size, the output format and size, and how much smaller or larger the new file is. Check the preview, then press Download.

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