Convert TIFF to JPG — Free TIFF to JPG Converter

How to Convert TIFF to JPG

Why Convert TIFF to JPG?

TIFF files are common in scanning, photography, and print workflows, but they are impractically large for sharing, emailing, or web use. A single TIFF scan can be 20–50 MB. Converting to JPG shrinks the file to a fraction of that size while keeping the photo looking great for everyday use.

JPG is the universal photo format accepted by every email client, social network, and web platform. Converting your TIFF scans and photos to JPG makes them easy to share and upload without worrying about file size limits or compatibility.

Nothing here is sent anywhere: the TIFF is decoded and re-encoded by your own machine. For scanned contracts, tax forms, and medical records, that locality is the security model.

For lossless quality, convert your TIFF to PNG instead. After converting to JPG, compress your images for even smaller files. The default quality of 85 provides an excellent balance between size and visual clarity.

Compress your JPG · TIFF to PNG

What changes going from TIFF to JPG

The TIFF side of this conversion is the complicated one. LeanImg reads the first image directory in the file, unpacks whatever compression it finds there (none, LZW, PackBits, deflate, CCITT fax coding or embedded JPEG) and turns the result into plain 8-bit RGBA before MozJPEG ever sees it. A 16-bit sample keeps its high byte and loses the low one, with no dithering. A CMYK TIFF goes through a fixed arithmetic conversion to RGB rather than through its embedded profile, so prepress colours will shift.

If the TIFF carries an alpha sample, JPEG has nowhere to put it: transparent pixels are composited onto white before encoding. Every tag is discarded along with the alpha. That includes the resolution tags, so a 300 dpi scan arrives as a JPEG with the same pixel dimensions and no dpi at all, and EXIF, ICC and GeoTIFF data go the same way.

The output is a progressive JPEG at the quality you set, 85 unless you open the options and move the slider, with colour subsampled the way nearly every JPEG encoder does it at that setting. Expect an uncompressed or LZW TIFF to shrink to a small fraction of its size, often under a tenth for photographs. Skip this when the TIFF is a bilevel CCITT scan of a text page: that file is already tiny, and a JPEG of it will be larger and grow ringing around every letter. Send those to PNG instead.

TIFF vs JPG

What is a JPG file?

JPEG is the photographic standard the Joint Photographic Experts Group published in 1992, as ISO/IEC 10918-1 and ITU-T T.81. It cuts the image into 8x8 blocks, runs a discrete cosine transform over each one, then discards the coefficients your eye is least likely to miss — and almost every encoder throws away three quarters of the color resolution first, which is why colored text and thin diagram lines suffer. No JPEG mode has an alpha channel, so transparency has to be flattened onto a solid color.

How to open a JPG file

Every operating system opens a JPEG with no help at all: Preview, Photos and Quick Look on macOS, Photos and Paint on Windows, GIMP or Eye of GNOME on Linux, and every browser on every platform renders a .jpg inline. For scripted work, libjpeg-turbo ships cjpeg, djpeg and jpegtran, and jpegtran can rotate or crop without re-encoding on 8 pixel boundaries.

Convert other formats to JPG

Convert TIFF to other formats

• TIFF to PNG

Frequently Asked Questions