TIFF File Format: When You Need It and How to Convert

I once tried to email a photo to a print shop. Simple enough, right? Except the file was a TIFF, it weighed in at 48 megabytes, and Gmail politely told me to go find another way. I ended up uploading it to Google Drive, sharing the link, and waiting for the print shop guy to download it on what I can only assume was a DSL connection from 2004. The whole process took longer than the actual print job.

That’s TIFF in a nutshell. It’s the format that does everything the print industry needs and absolutely nothing the internet wants. Nobody wakes up excited to work with TIFF files. But if you’ve ever dealt with a publisher, a print shop, or an archival project, you’ve probably been told in no uncertain terms: “Send us a TIFF.”

So let’s talk about why this format exists, when you actually need it, and — more importantly for most of you — how to convert your TIFFs into something the rest of the world can use. For a broader look at converting between image formats, check out our complete image format conversion guide.

Why TIFF Files Are So Absurdly Large

Here’s the thing about TIFF that catches people off guard: a single photograph can easily be 30, 50, even 100 megabytes. That’s not a bug. It’s the entire point.

TIFF — Tagged Image File Format, if you care about the full name — was designed in 1986 by Aldus Corporation (which Adobe later acquired). The goal wasn’t “make files small.” The goal was “store absolutely everything about this image with zero compromises.” And that’s exactly what it does.

An uncompressed TIFF stores every single pixel at full color depth, with no data thrown away, no clever shortcuts, no approximations. A 4000x3000 pixel image at 24-bit color? That’s 36 megabytes of raw pixel data before you even think about metadata. Bump it to 16-bit per channel (48-bit total) for professional editing, and you’re looking at 72 megabytes for the same image.

But the size story doesn’t end there. TIFF supports layers, which means a working file from Photoshop can contain the base image, adjustment layers, masks, and annotations all packed into one file. I’ve seen production TIFFs from design agencies that cracked 500 megabytes. One file. For one image.

TIFF does technically support compression. LZW and ZIP compression are both options, and they’re both lossless — meaning you don’t sacrifice any quality. LZW might knock a 50MB TIFF down to 30MB, which is helpful but not exactly transformative. It’s still massive compared to what a JPEG or WebP would give you. And some print workflows actually prefer uncompressed TIFFs because certain RIP software handles them more reliably.

Then there’s the color depth situation. TIFF handles 8-bit, 16-bit, and even 32-bit per channel without breaking a sweat. It supports RGB, CMYK, LAB, and grayscale color spaces. That CMYK support alone is a big deal — it’s one of the main reasons the print industry latched onto TIFF and never let go. Most web-friendly formats like PNG and WebP don’t do CMYK at all.

The Print Industry’s Ride-or-Die Format

I asked a friend who runs a print shop why they still demand TIFFs when modern formats exist. His answer was basically: “Because everything else has given me problems at some point, and TIFF never has.”

That’s the real pitch for TIFF. It’s not exciting. It’s reliable.

When you send a file to a commercial printer, it goes through a process called RIP (Raster Image Processing), where the software translates your image into instructions for the printing press. That RIP software needs to know exactly what every pixel looks like, in the correct color space, at the correct bit depth. TIFF delivers all of that without ambiguity. There’s no guessing about compression artifacts, no worrying about color space conversions, no wondering if the transparency will render correctly.

Publishers love TIFF for the same reasons. If you’ve ever submitted images for a book, magazine, or catalog, the specs almost certainly say “300 DPI, CMYK, TIFF format.” That trinity has been the standard for decades, and nobody’s in a hurry to change it. The workflows are built, the quality is proven, and switching would mean retraining an entire industry.

Archivists and librarians are another group of TIFF loyalists. The Library of Congress recommends TIFF for digital preservation. When you’re storing images that need to be readable in 50 or 100 years, you want a format that’s simple, well-documented, and doesn’t depend on proprietary decoders. TIFF checks all those boxes. It’s an open standard, the spec is publicly available, and the format is so widely adopted that support isn’t going anywhere.

Medical imaging, scientific research, GIS mapping — all heavy TIFF users. Anywhere that pixel-perfect accuracy matters more than file size, TIFF is probably involved.

When TIFF Is Like Bringing a Firehose to a Water Fight

For all its strengths in print and archival work, TIFF is spectacularly wrong for a long list of everyday tasks. And I mean spectacularly.

Websites. Most browsers don’t even render TIFF files natively. If you somehow manage to serve a TIFF on your website, you’re asking visitors to download tens of megabytes for a single image. Your page load times would be catastrophic. Your Core Web Vitals would look like a crime scene. Just use WebP or JPEG — you’ll get visually identical results at 1-2% of the file size. Our WebP conversion guide walks through making that switch, and our guide on image formats for the web covers the best options more broadly.

Email attachments. Most email providers cap attachments at 25MB. A single high-resolution TIFF can blow past that. Even if it goes through, you’re clogging someone’s inbox with a file they probably can’t open on their phone without downloading a special app.

Social media. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter — none of them accept TIFF uploads. They’ll either reject the file or silently convert it to JPEG, stripping out all the extra data you were trying to preserve. You’re doing extra work for zero benefit.

Sharing casually with friends and family. Nobody wants to receive a 40MB file of your vacation photo. Convert it to JPEG first. Your relationships will thank you.

The rule of thumb is pretty simple: if the image is going to be viewed on a screen by a normal person, TIFF is overkill. If it’s going to a printer or an archive, TIFF might be exactly right.

Shrinking the Beast: Converting TIFF to JPG or PNG

This is the conversion most people need. You’ve got a TIFF file — maybe from a scanner, maybe from a photographer, maybe from a client who’s convinced everything must be archival quality — and you need to get it into a format that’s actually usable for web, email, or presentations.

TIFF to JPG

Converting TIFF to JPG is the most common path, and it makes sense for photographs. JPEG’s lossy compression can take a 40MB TIFF and reduce it to 500KB-2MB while keeping the image looking great to the human eye. At 80-85% quality, the compression artifacts are essentially invisible for photographic content.

The trade-off is real, though. JPEG throws away data that can’t be recovered. If you might need the full-quality version later — for reprinting, re-editing, or archival — keep the original TIFF and treat the JPEG as a distribution copy. I’ve watched too many people delete their TIFFs after converting, only to need them six months later when a client wants to change the crop or a publisher needs a higher-resolution version.

JPEG also doesn’t support transparency. If your TIFF has transparent areas (which is uncommon but possible), those will get filled with a solid color — usually white — during conversion.

TIFF to PNG

Converting TIFF to PNG is the better choice when you need to preserve sharp edges, text, or transparency. PNG is lossless, so you won’t lose any quality in the conversion. The file will still be significantly smaller than the original TIFF because PNG’s DEFLATE compression is more efficient for most content.

That said, PNG files for photographs are still quite large — much bigger than JPEG. A 4000x3000 photo might go from 50MB as a TIFF to 15-25MB as a PNG. Helpful, but not exactly pocket-sized. If the image is a photograph destined for the web, JPEG or WebP will get you much smaller files. If it’s a graphic, chart, or screenshot, PNG is the way to go.

You can also convert TIFF to BMP if you’re working with legacy systems that require it, though that’s an increasingly rare scenario. Our BMP conversion guide covers those edge cases and the full range of BMP migration paths.

What About Quality?

Here’s what I tell people who worry about quality loss during conversion: it depends entirely on your use case. If the image is going on a website, a well-compressed JPEG at 80% quality will be indistinguishable from the TIFF on screen. If the image is going back to a print shop, don’t convert it — keep the TIFF. If you’re archiving for the long term, the TIFF is your master copy and the JPEG is the version you actually share.

Lossless formats like PNG preserve everything, so quality isn’t a concern there. The question is just whether you can tolerate the file size. For more on the differences between lossless formats, see our lossless image formats guide.

Going the Other Way: Converting TO TIFF

Sometimes you need to go in the opposite direction. A print shop asks for TIFF, a publisher’s submission guidelines require it, or you’re building a digital archive and want a standardized lossless format. Whatever the reason, converting to TIFF is straightforward — but there are a few things to keep in mind.

JPG to TIFF

Converting JPG to TIFF is something print shops request all the time, and it’s important to understand what this does and doesn’t accomplish.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: converting a JPEG to TIFF doesn’t magically restore quality. If the JPEG was compressed at 70% quality and lost some detail, wrapping it in a TIFF container doesn’t bring that detail back. You get a much larger file with the same visual quality as the JPEG. The pixels are identical; they’re just stored differently.

So why do print shops ask for it? Partly convention. Partly because their RIP software handles TIFF more reliably. And partly because a TIFF won’t degrade further — once you’ve converted, the file is frozen in its current state. Re-saving a JPEG repeatedly causes cumulative quality loss, but a TIFF stays stable no matter how many times you open and save it.

If you’re preparing files for print, always start with the highest quality source you can find. Ideally that’s a RAW file or a high-resolution original, not a JPEG that’s been downloaded from a website and resaved three times. If your source images are HEIC files from an iPhone, you’ll want to convert those first — our HEIC to JPG guide covers the best workflow for getting those files into a universally compatible format before any further conversion.

PNG to TIFF

PNG to TIFF conversion is genuinely lossless in both directions. Since both formats preserve all pixel data, you’re just changing the container. The TIFF will likely be larger (especially if stored uncompressed), but you haven’t lost anything.

This conversion makes sense when you have PNG files and need to meet print specifications that require TIFF, or when you’re consolidating an archive into a single format. You can also convert BMP to TIFF for similar archival and compatibility reasons.

Getting the Settings Right

When converting to TIFF for print, there are a few settings that matter.

Compression is optional. LZW compression reduces file size with no quality loss, and most modern print workflows handle it fine. If you’re not sure, ask your printer. Some old-school shops prefer uncompressed TIFFs because they’ve been burned by compatibility issues with compressed files in the past.

Color space matters a lot. If you’re converting for professional printing, the file should be in CMYK, not RGB. Most conversion tools default to preserving the original color space, so a RGB JPEG becomes a RGB TIFF. For CMYK conversion, you’ll typically need Photoshop, Affinity Photo, or GIMP with a CMYK plugin. Our image conversion for print guide covers this process in detail.

Bit depth is worth considering. 8-bit per channel is standard and works for most purposes. 16-bit gives you more headroom for editing and smoother gradients, but doubles the file size. Unless you’re doing serious color grading or have banding issues, 8-bit is fine.

TIFF vs PSD vs RAW: The Professional Format Showdown

If you work in photography or design, you’ve probably wondered how TIFF stacks up against Photoshop’s PSD format and camera RAW files. They all serve professional workflows, but they’re not interchangeable.

RAW files are what your camera captures — the unprocessed sensor data before any white balance, exposure, or color corrections are applied. They’re the digital equivalent of an undeveloped film negative. RAW gives you maximum flexibility in post-processing because you’re working with all the data the sensor captured. But RAW files are proprietary (Canon’s CR3 is different from Nikon’s NEF is different from Sony’s ARW), they’re huge, and they’re not meant to be a final deliverable. You process RAW into something else.

PSD files are Photoshop’s native format. They preserve layers, masks, adjustment layers, smart objects, text layers — everything you build during editing. PSD is your working file, the one you keep open while you’re actively designing. The downside is that PSD is proprietary to Adobe, and while many applications can read PSD files, not all of them interpret every feature correctly.

TIFF sits in between. It supports layers (when saved from Photoshop), multiple compression options, and a wide range of color spaces. But its real role is as a finalized delivery and archival format. When you’re done editing in PSD, you flatten and export to TIFF for the printer. When you’re done processing a RAW file, you might save a TIFF as your high-quality master.

The typical professional workflow looks like this: shoot RAW, edit in Lightroom or Photoshop (saving PSD for complex composites), export TIFF for print delivery and archival, export JPEG or WebP for web and social. Each format has its lane, and they don’t really compete with each other — they complement each other.

For a comprehensive look at how different image file formats compare, including when to use each one, we’ve got a detailed breakdown.

Batch Converting TIFF Files Without Losing Your Mind

Converting one or two TIFFs is no big deal. Open in Photoshop, hit Save As, pick your format, done. But what about when you’ve got 200 scanned documents in TIFF format that need to become JPEGs for a website? Or 50 product photos from a photographer that all arrived as 60MB TIFFs and need to be web-ready by tomorrow?

That’s where batch conversion saves you from repetitive strain injury and existential despair.

BulkImagePro’s format converter handles exactly this scenario. Drop your stack of TIFF files in, choose your output format — JPG, PNG, WebP, or BMP — and let it process the entire batch. You can also convert in the other direction: take a folder of JPEGs, PNGs, or BMPs and convert them all to TIFF for print submission.

The beauty of batch processing is consistency. Every file gets the same quality settings, the same format, the same treatment. No accidentally saving one image at 60% quality because you clicked the wrong slider. No forgetting to change the format on file number 47. It’s the kind of tedious, error-prone work that computers are genuinely better at than humans.

If your TIFFs are also oversized for your needs — say you’ve got 6000x4000 pixel images but only need 1200x800 for your website — you can resize in bulk and then convert, or use our image compressor to get them web-ready in one workflow.

For a walkthrough of different batch processing approaches, our batch image conversion guide covers command-line tools, desktop software, and online options.

The Bottom Line on TIFF

TIFF isn’t going anywhere. It’s been the workhorse of professional imaging for nearly four decades, and the industries that depend on it — printing, publishing, archival, medical imaging — aren’t switching formats anytime soon. If someone asks you for a TIFF, they have a good reason.

But for the other 95% of what you do with images — sharing online, posting to social media, building websites, emailing to clients — TIFF is the wrong tool. Convert those files to JPEG, PNG, or WebP and save yourself the headaches of bloated file sizes and compatibility issues.

Keep your TIFFs as masters. Share everything else as something lighter.

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Need to convert TIFF files to web-friendly formats or prepare images as TIFF for print? Try BulkImagePro — batch convert between TIFF, JPG, PNG, WebP, and more. Process up to 50 files at once, right in your browser.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What's the best format to convert TIFF to for web use?

For photographs, convert TIFF to JPEG or WebP. Both offer dramatic file size reductions (often 95% or more) with minimal visible quality loss at standard compression settings. WebP produces slightly smaller files than JPEG at equivalent quality, and all modern browsers support it. For graphics with sharp edges, text, or transparency, convert to PNG instead. You can batch convert your TIFFs using BulkImagePro's TIFF to JPG converter or TIFF to PNG converter.

Does converting JPG to TIFF improve image quality?

No. Converting a JPEG to TIFF changes the file container but doesn't restore data that was lost during JPEG compression. The image will look exactly the same -- it'll just be a much larger file. However, saving as TIFF does prevent further quality degradation from re-saving, since TIFF uses lossless storage. For the best print results, always start from the highest-quality source available, ideally a RAW file or an original high-resolution image.

Why do print shops require TIFF files?

Print shops prefer TIFF because it supports lossless compression (no quality degradation), CMYK color space (required for professional printing), high bit depth (16-bit per channel for smooth gradients), and rich metadata. Their RIP (Raster Image Processing) software handles TIFF reliably, and the format has been the print industry standard for decades. It eliminates guesswork about compression artifacts or color space issues that can cause problems with other formats.

Can I open TIFF files on my phone?

It depends on the phone and the TIFF file. iPhones can open basic TIFF files natively through the Files app or Photos. Android phones generally need a third-party app like Google Photos or a dedicated image viewer. Complex TIFFs with layers, CMYK color spaces, or unusual compression may not display correctly on mobile devices. If you need to view TIFFs regularly on your phone, converting them to JPEG or PNG first is much more reliable.

What's the difference between TIFF and PNG for lossless storage?

Both TIFF and PNG offer lossless compression, but they serve different purposes. TIFF supports CMYK color (essential for print), higher bit depths (up to 32-bit per channel), layers, multiple pages in one file, and extensive metadata -- making it the standard for professional print and archival work. PNG is limited to RGB color and 16-bit per channel, but it's universally supported by web browsers and produces smaller files for most content. Use TIFF for print and archival; use PNG for web and screen display. Our lossless formats guide covers this comparison in detail.

How do I batch convert multiple TIFF files at once?

The fastest way is to use a batch conversion tool like BulkImagePro, which lets you drag in multiple TIFF files and convert them all to JPG, PNG, WebP, or other formats simultaneously. For command-line users, ImageMagick can convert entire directories with a single command. Photoshop's built-in Actions and Batch Processing features also handle this, though they're slower and require a paid subscription. Whichever tool you use, batch processing ensures consistent settings across all files and saves significant time compared to converting one by one.