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TIFF to JPG: Print & Scan Files for Web

TIFF files are huge and rejected by most upload forms. How to convert TIFF to JPG properly — quality, batch tips, when to keep the TIFF.

By Formatly

TIFF is the format of scanners, print shops, and archives — and it’s terrible for everything else. A single scanned page can be 50 MB. Upload forms reject .tif files. Browsers won’t display them. Here’s how to convert TIFF to JPG for web use without wrecking quality, and when you should leave the TIFF alone.

Why TIFF files are so big

TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) is a container, not a single compression scheme — it can hold uncompressed pixels, LZW-compressed data, or even JPEG-compressed data. In practice, most TIFFs you encounter are:

  • Scans saved uncompressed or with lossless LZW — enormous, pixel-perfect
  • Print-ready exports from Photoshop/InDesign — often with layers, CMYK color, or 16-bit depth
  • Archival masters — deliberately large, because storage is cheaper than re-scanning

A 300 DPI A4 scan at 24-bit color is roughly 25 MB uncompressed. The same page as a quality-90 JPG is under 1 MB. For screen viewing, those extra 24 MB buy you literally nothing visible.

Converting: the settings that matter

Quality: 85–92. Scanned documents and print exports have already survived their journey — you’re converting for distribution, not archiving. Quality 90 is the sweet spot: text stays crisp, file sizes collapse.

Resolution: consider downsampling. A 300–600 DPI scan viewed on screen is massive overkill. For web viewing, 150 DPI equivalent (roughly 1750px on the long edge for A4) is plenty. Downsampling before JPG compression gives dramatically smaller files than compressing the full-res scan.

Color: watch for CMYK. Print TIFFs are often CMYK, and browsers/JPG viewers expect RGB. A proper converter handles the CMYK→RGB translation during conversion — if your converted JPG looks washed out or oddly colored, a botched color conversion is the likely culprit. (Our TIFF converter handles this in the browser.)

Multi-page TIFFs. Fax-era and document-scan TIFFs sometimes contain multiple pages in one file. Most converters extract the first page; if you need all pages, split them first or convert to PDF instead — our image-to-PDF tool handles multi-image documents.

When to KEEP the TIFF

  • It’s your archival master. The scan of the only physical copy, the print-ready export with layers — keep the TIFF, distribute the JPG.
  • You’re sending it to a print shop. They want TIFF (or PDF). Don’t “helpfully” convert to JPG first — you’ll degrade what they need.
  • Further editing is planned. Every JPG save is lossy. Edit from the TIFF, export JPG last.

The rule: TIFF is for production and archiving; JPG is for distribution and screens. Convert copies, never the original.

Batch converting scan archives

Scanned archives are the classic batch job — hundreds of TIFFs from a document project, all needing web versions. This is exactly the workflow where consistency matters: same quality, same max dimensions, same naming scheme (scan-001.jpg, scan-002.jpg), into a separate folder. Convert the whole batch with identical settings so the archive looks uniform.

One caution: spot-check the first few conversions at 100% zoom, especially for text documents. Fine print is where aggressive compression shows first. If small text looks fuzzy, bump quality to 92–95 for the batch.

The upload-form problem

“We only accept JPG/PNG/PDF” — every government portal, job application site, and academic submission system. If your source is a TIFF scan, convert to JPG at quality 90+ (or straight to PDF if the form accepts it — images to PDF preserves quality better for documents). Check the form’s file-size limit before converting so you only do it once.

Practical next steps