What Is a TIFF File?
TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) is the format scanners, fax software, Photoshop and film-scanning or RAW-editing software reach for when nothing may be thrown away. Created by Aldus in 1986 and maintained by Adobe since 1994, it can store uncompressed pixels, 16 bits per channel, CMYK color for print, an alpha channel, and several pages in a single file.
Outside of those tools it is hard to use. Apart from Safari, browsers won’t display a TIFF, many upload forms reject it, and the Windows Photos app shows only the first page of a multi-page file. PNG keeps the two things people usually want from a TIFF, lossless pixels and transparency, in a format every browser and app opens.
TIFF to PNG or TIFF to JPG?
Both come from the same TIFF; they suit different destinations.
- PNG when the image must stay exactly as it is: logos and cut-outs with transparent backgrounds, line art, screenshots, scanned drawings, anything you plan to edit further. No compression loss, and the alpha channel survives.
- JPG when the file needs to be small: photos for email or the web, and scans you’re sending rather than editing. JPG drops detail the eye rarely notices and ends up a fraction of the size. That’s TIFF to JPG.
PNG compresses losslessly, so a photographic TIFF often becomes a PNG that is still roughly half the size of the uncompressed original, while a JPG of the same image can be a tenth of that. Pick PNG for fidelity, JPG for size.
Multi-Page TIFFs: One PNG Per Page
PNG holds one image, so a multi-page TIFF is split. drawing.tif with three pages becomes drawing-p1.png, drawing-p2.png and drawing-p3.png, listed in order. Download all as ZIP collects them. Single-page files keep their name (plan.tif becomes plan.png), and up to 100 pages per file are converted.
What Is Kept and What Changes
Every common compression works. Uncompressed, LZW, ZIP, PackBits, JPEG-compressed and CCITT Group 3/4 fax TIFFs are all decoded. Rare schemes such as JPEG 2000 and ZSTD, mostly found in GIS files, are not supported; the converter reports an error rather than producing a blank image. Fax files come out as crisp black-and-white PNGs. Because PNG stores them as 8-bit rather than 1-bit, the PNG is usually a few times larger than a Group 4 fax file, though still only a few hundred KB per page.
Transparency is kept. An alpha channel in the TIFF becomes an alpha channel in the PNG, pixel for pixel.
16-bit becomes 8-bit. The PNG is written with 8 bits per channel, which is all an ordinary screen can show. If you need to keep 16-bit data for further editing, keep the TIFF.
CMYK becomes RGB. Print-ready CMYK files are converted with a standard formula rather than an ICC profile, so colors can look slightly different from a soft-proofed view in Photoshop.
Orientation is applied. If a scanner or camera stored the image sideways and marked the true orientation in a tag, the PNG comes out upright.
Floating-point TIFFs are refused. 32-bit HDR files from renderers and scientific tools can’t be converted accurately, so the converter reports an error rather than producing wrong colors.
How This Converter Works
Chrome and Firefox can’t decode TIFF on their own, so pixconv.io includes a small decoder that runs in your browser:
- The file is read locally and its pages are identified.
- Each page is decoded into raw pixels, including any decompression and 16-bit or CMYK conversion.
- The pixels are written as a PNG, with transparency intact.
- The PNGs are handed to you as downloads from your own machine.
No upload means no queue, no daily limit and no server-side size cap. The limits are your device’s: files up to 100 MB each, images up to 256 megapixels, and 100 files (or 500 MB) per batch. The decoder is fetched only when a TIFF is actually dropped.
The quality slider is greyed out on this page. PNG output is lossless, so there is nothing to trade off.
Step-by-Step Guide
Step 1: Add your TIFF files.
Drag and drop .tif or .tiff files into the drop zone, or click “browse files”. Up to 100 files fit in one batch.
Step 2: Let the conversion run. Each page is decoded and saved as a PNG. Multi-page files expand into one entry per page.
Step 3: Download. Click Download next to each PNG, or Download all as ZIP for the whole set.
TIFF vs PNG: A Quick Comparison
| TIFF | PNG | |
|---|---|---|
| Compression | Optional: none, lossless (LZW, ZIP, PackBits, CCITT) or lossy (JPEG) | Always lossless |
| Bits per channel | 1 (fax), 8 or 16 | 8 here (the format allows up to 16) |
| Color modes | RGB, grayscale, CMYK, palette | RGB, grayscale, palette |
| Transparency | Yes | Yes |
| Pages per file | Many | One |
| Opens in a browser | Safari only | Every browser |
| Accepted by web forms | Often rejected | Universally |
Keep the TIFF as your master copy and use the PNG wherever the file has to be viewed, uploaded or edited in a general-purpose tool.
Converting Without a Converter
For a single file, the tools already on your computer can do it:
- Windows 11 / 10: open the file in the Photos app, choose Save as from the ”…” menu, and pick PNG. Photos shows only the first page of a multi-page TIFF, so that is the page you get.
- Mac: open the file in Preview, choose File > Export, and set Format to PNG.
The converter above is for the other cases: a batch of scans, or a multi-page file you want split in one go.
Privacy and Security
Design files, scanned documents and medical exports are the files you least want on someone else’s server. Converting here means:
- Nothing is uploaded to any server
- Nothing about your files is stored, cached or logged
- No account is needed
- No watermark is added
Tips for Best Results
- Logos and cut-outs: this is the right page. PNG keeps the transparent background; JPG would paint it white.
- Big photos: consider JPG. A lossless PNG of a 24-megapixel photo is large. If it’s for sharing rather than editing, TIFF to JPG will be far smaller.
- Fax and document scans convert well. Black-and-white pages become sharp PNGs of a few hundred KB per page.
- Check the page count. If a file looked like one page elsewhere, the list here shows every page it actually contains.