TIFF is the format of scanners, fax services, print shops and archives: a scanned contract, a fax that arrived by email, a high-resolution photo for printing, a page from a medical or legal system. One .tif file can hold many pages. Chrome, Edge and Firefox cannot display TIFF at all, so on a Chromebook, a Windows PC or an Android phone the file often opens as a download that goes nowhere. Most online TIFF viewers want the file uploaded to their server first, which is not something to do with a signed contract or a medical letter.
This page decodes the TIFF itself and shows every page, one under the other, at their real proportions. It is free to use, with no account and no upload limit, and it runs entirely in your browser: nothing is uploaded, and while the page stays open, a feature you have already used keeps working offline.
- Why won't my browser open a TIFF file?
- Chrome, Edge and Firefox do not support TIFF images, so they download the file instead of showing it. Safari on a Mac or iPhone does show them, and Preview on a Mac opens multi-page TIFFs. Everywhere else, this page does the decoding instead.
- Is a .tif file the same as a .tiff file?
- Yes. Both are the Tagged Image File Format; .tif is the three-letter spelling older Windows needed, and .tiff the full one. This page opens either.
- How do I see all the pages of a multi-page TIFF?
- Many image viewers show only the first page and say nothing about the rest. This page shows every page in order, with a caption under each, and the count at the top says how many the file holds.
- Why do faxes look squashed in other viewers?
- A standard-resolution fax is scanned at 204 by 98 dots per inch, twice as dense across as down, so a viewer that draws it pixel for pixel shows the page at half its height. This page reads the resolution stored in the file and draws each page at its true proportions, so a standard fax looks like the paper it came from.
- Can I convert the TIFF to PDF or JPG here?
- Yes. Under each page are Save as JPG and Save as PNG; PNG keeps a fax or a black-and-white scan sharp. Save as PDF at the top makes one PDF of the whole file on your device, a page for each page, sized from the resolution stored in the TIFF (a 300 dpi A4 scan comes out A4; a file with no resolution is taken at 96 dpi). Black-and-white pages go in as sharp 1-bit images and the rest as JPEG, which keeps the PDF small. Pages larger than 40 million pixels are reduced to that size first.
- Can I convert many TIFF files to JPG in one go?
- Yes. Drop up to 500 .tif or .tiff files on the Convert many TIFF files box, choose JPG, PNG or PDF, and they are converted one after another and saved as one ZIP. As JPG or PNG, each page of a multi-page file becomes its own picture, named like "scan - page 01.jpg"; as PDF, its pages stay together in one PDF. Fax pages are corrected to their true proportions either way. Pages that cannot be decoded are listed with the reason, and the rest are still saved.
- Does the PDF keep all the pages of a multi-page TIFF?
- Yes, up to 2,000 pages per file, each as its own PDF page in the order the TIFF stores them. A page that cannot be decoded is left out and listed with the reason, and the rest of the file still goes into the PDF.
- Does converting a TIFF to PDF lose quality?
- Black-and-white pages, which is most scans of letters and every fax, go in as 1-bit images with lossless compression: exactly the pixels of the TIFF. Greyscale and colour pages go in as high-quality JPEG (quality 88), which keeps a scan looking as it did at a fraction of the size, though it is not pixel for pixel. The resolution is never reduced, apart from a page over 40 million pixels, which is scaled down to fit the browser's memory.
- What size will the PDF pages be?
- With As scanned, each page is its pixel size divided by the resolution in the file, so a 300 dpi scan of an A4 letter comes out A4 and a fax comes out at its paper size. A file with no resolution is taken at 96 dpi. With A4 or US Letter, every page is that paper (turned sideways for a wide page) with the picture scaled down to fit and centred, never enlarged.
- Can I make the PDF of a TIFF searchable?
- Not on this page: the PDF holds pictures of the pages, as the TIFF did. Open the PDF in the OCR Toolkit to add a hidden text layer so you can search and copy the words.
- Is the image uploaded?
- No. The TIFF is decoded by this browser tab on your own device, and nothing in it is sent to this site or anywhere else.