TIFF to PDF Converter

1Drop your TIFF inIt never leaves your machine.

2Check the pages foundEverything updates as you change it.

3Build and downloadAssembled here and saved from your own browser.

One file, often a whole document

A TIFF is a container rather than a picture, and a scan routinely holds many pages inside a single file. Each one is pulled out and becomes its own page.

How to use this tool

Drop your TIFF files onto the box at the top, or click it to browse. A decoder loads the first time one appears, then each page inside each file arrives as its own thumbnail.

Large scans take a moment. That is the decoding happening on your machine rather than a server, which is the trade for nothing being uploaded.

From there it behaves like any other set of images: set the paper and margin, reorder or remove pages, check the resolution badges, and build.

One file, many pages

This is the thing that makes TIFF different from every other image format here. A JPG is one picture. A TIFF is a container, and a single file can hold a whole document: a twenty page contract from a departmental scanner is routinely one TIFF.

So a straight one file to one page conversion would be wrong. Each page inside the file is pulled out separately and becomes its own page in the PDF, in the order the file declares them, labelled so you can see that page 2 of 3 of a particular scan is page 2 of 3 of that scan.

Once they are separate you can treat them separately. Drag one to a different position, remove a blank separator sheet the scanner inserted, or drop a photograph in among them. The document that comes out is a normal PDF with no trace of the container it arrived in.

Why a browser cannot open a TIFF

Try it: drag a TIFF onto a browser tab and you will usually be offered a download rather than a picture. Not one major browser supports the format.

The reason is history rather than difficulty. TIFF was designed in the mid nineteen eighties for desktop publishing and scanning, years before the web, and it was built to be extensible: it can hold many different compression schemes, colour models and layouts inside the same file extension. That flexibility is exactly what made it useful in prepress and exactly what made it unattractive to browsers, which wanted a small number of predictable formats.

So reading one requires an actual decoder. This page loads a small one the first time a TIFF appears, unpacks each page to raw pixels, and hands those to the same page layout used everywhere else on the site. Because the decoder runs in your browser, the file still never leaves your machine.

It also explains the size difference. Plenty of TIFFs are stored uncompressed or lightly compressed, because they were made for archival quality rather than for sending. Re-encoding the pages on the way in usually produces a far smaller document.

A worked check you can repeat

Take a three page TIFF where the first two pages are 400 by 300 and the third is 300 by 400. It arrives as three thumbnails, named page 1 of 3, page 2 of 3 and page 3 of 3, and the third is portrait where the other two are landscape.

With orientation left on match each image, the first two pages come out landscape and the third portrait, which is what you want for a mixed scan. Force portrait instead and the landscape pages are letterboxed with white above and below rather than being cropped.

On the geometry, a 3000 by 2000 pixel scan on A4 with a 10 mm margin: the margin is 10 times 72 divided by 25.4, which is 28.35 points a side. On a landscape A4 of 841.89 by 595.28 that leaves a printable box of 785.19 by 538.58. The image ratio of 1.5 against a box ratio of 1.458 means width limits it, so the picture lands 785.19 wide and 523.46 tall. Effective resolution is 3000 pixels across 10.9 inches, about 275 dpi.

The multi page handling was checked by building a genuine three page uncompressed TIFF byte by byte, decoding it, and confirming the page count, the dimensions of each page and the actual pixel colours at known positions. The page geometry was checked against an independent implementation.

Mistakes that catch people out

Assuming one file means one page. A TIFF from a document scanner often holds the whole document. Check the thumbnail count against what you expected.

Forcing an orientation on a mixed scan. Scanned sets frequently mix portrait and landscape. Leaving orientation on match each image handles that on its own.

Deleting the TIFF straight afterwards. The pages are re-encoded, so this is a lossy conversion. If the TIFF is an archival master, keep it.

Loading a very large scan set at once. Decoding happens in your browser and holds pages in memory. Work in smaller batches if the tab starts labouring.

Expecting text to be searchable. A scan is a picture of a document. Nothing here adds a text layer, so the result is not searchable unless you run optical character recognition separately.

Common questions

Is my TIFF uploaded anywhere?

No. The decoding and the assembly both happen in your own browser, and the download comes from your machine. Nothing crosses the network, so there is nothing on a server to store or delete.

My TIFF has several pages. What happens?

Each page inside the file becomes its own page in the PDF, labelled with which page of which file it came from. You can reorder or remove any of them exactly like separate images.

Why can my browser not just open a TIFF?

Because no major browser supports it. TIFF predates the web and was built for scanning and publishing rather than for pages, so browsers never adopted it. A decoder has to be loaded to read one, which is what this page does.

Will the file get smaller?

Usually yes, often dramatically, because many TIFFs are stored with light compression or none at all. The pages are re-encoded on the way in, so a large scan typically lands at a small fraction of what it was.

One page of my TIFF is missing. Why?

A page that cannot be decoded is skipped rather than stopping the whole file. That normally means an unusual compression scheme inside that page. The pages that did decode are still built into the document.

Can I mix TIFFs with other images?

Yes. Drop in JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF and BMP alongside them. TIFFs get expanded into their pages first, then everything is laid out together in whatever order you arrange.

Related PDF tools and reference

Reference: The Library of Congress TIFF format description, for the container structure described above.