TIFF to PNG
Your browser will not display a .tif, and neither will most of the places you need to put one. TIFF is not really a format — it is a container that can hold a dozen different compressions and five different pixel layouts, which is exactly why nothing supports all of it. This decodes the file here, in the page, and hands you a PNG per page.
Drop TIFF files here
.tif, .tiff — multiple files allowed
What it reads
The label under each result says what the file turned out to be — compression, bit depth, colour model and layout. That is useful on its own when someone has handed you a TIFF and nobody knows what wrote it.
- Uncompressed, LZW, Deflate (ZIP) and PackBits. Between them these cover almost every TIFF in circulation: LZW from Photoshop and scanners, Deflate from GIS and archival exports, PackBits from older Mac software.
- Horizontal differencing (the predictor). Photoshop's "LZW with prediction" stores each sample as its difference from the one to its left; a reader that ignores it produces coloured smears rather than an error.
- Strips and tiles. Large images are usually tiled — 256×256 blocks in raster order rather than whole rows — and both layouts are handled, including the partial tiles along the right and bottom edges.
- Chunky and planar. Planar files store all the reds, then all the greens, then all the blues, as three separate planes.
- 1, 2, 4, 8 and 16 bits per sample, greyscale in either polarity, RGB, palette (with its colour map), CMYK, and an alpha channel — premultiplied or not, and un-premultiplied properly when it is.
- Both byte orders,
IIandMM. The order is in the first two bytes of the file, and it applies to every number in it including the ones inside 16-bit samples. - Multi-page documents. A scanned contract is one TIFF with one image directory per page; each becomes its own PNG, numbered, and the whole set can be downloaded as a ZIP.
- JPEG-compressed TIFFs, where the page is a single strip — the JPEG tables live in their own tag and are spliced back in front of the scan before your browser's own decoder is handed the result.
- The orientation tag. A file from a camera or a scanner can be stored sideways with a flag saying so. It is applied, so the PNG comes out the way up you expect.
What it will not read, and what to do instead
- CCITT Group 3 and Group 4 — the fax codecs, common in black-and-white scanned archives. They are a different kind of compression entirely (run lengths of black and white, Huffman coded) and are not implemented here. The status line names them explicitly rather than failing vaguely.
- BigTIFF, the 64-bit variant used for files over 4 GB. It is a different header, and a browser tab is the wrong place for it anyway.
- Floating-point samples — 32-bit float TIFFs are elevation models and scientific measurements, not pictures. Converting one to 8-bit PNG needs a decision about the range that only you can make.
- JPEG 2000 and old-style JPEG (compression 6), neither of which any browser can decode.
For any of those, ImageMagick's convert or libtiff's tiff2rgba will
produce a plain TIFF that this page reads.
Why the file is bigger or smaller than you expected
PNG is lossless and so is LZW, but they compress differently: a photographic TIFF usually gets smaller as a PNG, while a flat-colour or bilevel scan can get larger. If size matters more than exactness, PNG to JPG after this will shrink a photograph by an order of magnitude. A 16-bit TIFF is halved on the way through, because a canvas is 8 bits per channel — the tonal range is preserved, the extra precision is not.
Privacy
100% client-side. The TIFF is decoded and re-encoded in your browser; nothing is uploaded. That matters more here than usual — TIFF is the format of scanned contracts, medical images and archive masters.
Related tools
- PNG to TIFF — the other direction.
- Image inspector — dimensions, colour depth and metadata of what comes out.
- PNG to PDF — for a multi-page scan, after converting.
- Compress PNG — the pages out of a big TIFF are usually worth compressing.
- PPM to PNG and BMP to PNG — the other formats nothing opens.