TIFF to GIF Converter — Convert TIFF to GIF Online
Drop your TIFF below and pick GIF as the output format. Free, private, and entirely in your browser with no upload required — LZW, CMYK, 16-bit, and multi-page files all open here, even though Chrome and Firefox cannot display a TIFF at all.
Drop images here or click to browse
Supports HEIC, WEBP, AVIF, BMP, TIFF, SVG, GIF, ICO, PDF, JPG, PNG
100% Private — Your files never leave your device
All conversion happens directly in your browser using JavaScript. Nothing is uploaded to any server. Your images stay on your computer the entire time.
When to Convert TIFF to GIF
These formats sit at opposite ends of an image's life. TIFF is what a scanner, a tethered camera, or a prepress tool hands you: a big, faithful master file. GIF is what software written decades ago will accept. You are converting to satisfy a program, not to improve a picture — so the question is whether something is actually forcing your hand:
- Legacy systems that whitelist GIF: old content management systems, forum and wiki uploaders, ticketing tools, and intranet apps that were configured in 2003 and never revisited.
- Embedded and industrial displays: kiosk firmware, LED sign controllers, e-ink shelf labels, and lab instruments frequently ship a GIF decoder and nothing else, because it is small and the patents expired long ago.
- Email templates: GIF is the one image format every mail client on earth renders without argument.
- Scanned line art and documents: a bilevel or few-colour scan loses nothing in a 256-colour palette, and GIF is understood everywhere.
- Binary transparency, universally supported: if you need a cut-out shape read by ancient software, a GIF's transparent palette entry works where a PNG alpha channel might not.
If none of those describe you, GIF is the wrong destination. Use TIFF to PNG for a lossless copy that keeps every colour and a real alpha channel, or TIFF to JPG for something small enough to email. The image format by use case guide names a target for each job.
Quality Considerations and Colour Depth Limits
GIF holds at most 256 colours. That is not a setting — it is the format. A GIF lists its colours in a table of no more than 256 entries, and every pixel stores an index into that table instead of a colour of its own. When your TIFF carries an alpha channel, one entry is spent marking transparency and 255 remain.
A photographic TIFF holds far more than that, so the converter picks a palette by median cut — repeatedly splitting the busiest region of colour space — then applies Floyd–Steinberg dithering, which scatters each rounding error into neighbouring pixels so a stipple of two palette colours reads as the shade your eye expected. It is a good disguise. It is not a substitute for the missing colours.
Here is the same 1600 × 1067 photograph, a 4.9 MB uncompressed TIFF holding 151,129 distinct colours, put through this converter three times. PSNR measures how close the result is to the original; higher is better, and above roughly 40 dB the difference is hard to see.
| Output | File size | Colours kept | Quality |
|---|---|---|---|
| GIF | 777 KB | 245 | 29.0 dB |
| JPG (92%) | 166 KB | ~150,000 | 50.8 dB |
| PNG | 1.6 MB | 151,129 | lossless |
Read that table before you convert a photograph. The GIF is nearly five times larger than the JPG and visibly worse — the worst result on both axes. GIF compresses with LZW, which hunts for repeated runs of identical pixels; photographs contain almost none, and the dithering that hides the palette adds exactly the fine noise LZW cannot pack. For a photo, GIF is a bad trade unless something is demanding one.
Flat artwork inverts the result. A 600 × 400 logo with a handful of solid colours converted to a 2.6 KB GIF with no visible loss at all, because it never needed more than a few dozen palette entries. Even then, honesty demands the footnote: saved as a tuned palette PNG the same logo came to 1.6 KB. GIF's advantage over TIFF to PNG is not size or quality — it is that everything, everywhere, reads it.
Use Cases: Animation vs. Static Image
A TIFF cannot become an animated GIF
GIF is famous for animation, so this is the single most common disappointment on this page: a TIFF is a still-image format. There are no frames inside it and no timing information, so there is nothing for a converter to animate. Every TIFF converts to a single static GIF, here and in every other tool. Building an animation means starting from a sequence of separate images or a video, not from one TIFF.
Multi-page TIFFs are pages, not frames
TIFF can hold many images in one file, and scanners and fax software use that to store multi-page documents. It is tempting to think those pages could become animation frames, but they carry no delays and no disposal rules — they are sheets of paper. This converter takes the first page, which is what a browser would show if it could open the file at all. To reach the later pages, split the document first with magick scan.tif page-%d.gif in ImageMagick, or open it in GIMP, which imports each page as a layer.
Static images GIF actually suits
Where a static GIF earns its place is flat, few-coloured artwork that has to be read by something old: a scanned schematic, a bilevel fax page, a chart, a screenshot of text, a logo with a cut-out background. These use a fraction of the 256-colour table, compress well under LZW because they are full of repeated runs, and land somewhere no other format is guaranteed to be understood. Photographs, gradients, and soft shadows are the cases to avoid — and if you have an animated GIF already and want to go the other way, use GIF to JPG for a still frame or GIF to WebP to keep the motion at a fraction of the size.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why convert TIFF to GIF?
Almost always because something on the other end refuses everything else. TIFF is what scanners, print shops, and archives produce; GIF is what old content systems, forum uploaders, email templates, and embedded displays were written to accept. This is a compatibility conversion, not a quality one — you are giving up colour to satisfy a piece of software. If nothing is forcing your hand, TIFF to PNG keeps every pixel and TIFF to JPG makes a far smaller file.
How many colours can a GIF hold?
256, and not one more. The limit is in the format: a GIF names its colours in a table with at most 256 entries, and every pixel stores an index into that table rather than a colour of its own. If your TIFF has an alpha channel, one entry is spent marking transparency and 255 are left for colour. A photographic TIFF routinely holds a hundred thousand distinct colours or more, so the converter has to choose which few hundred survive.
How much quality will I lose?
On a photograph, a lot. Converting a 1600 × 1067 photo — 151,129 distinct colours in the source TIFF — produced a GIF holding 245 of them, scoring 29.0 dB PSNR. The same TIFF saved as JPG scored 50.8 dB and came out nearly five times smaller. On flat artwork the story reverses: a logo or a diagram may use only a few dozen colours to begin with, so the palette costs you nothing visible.
Why is my GIF bigger than a JPG would be?
Because GIF compresses with LZW, which looks for repeated runs of identical pixels, while JPG throws away detail your eye is bad at noticing. A photograph has almost no exact repetition, so LZW finds little to compress — and the dithering used to disguise the 256-colour palette actively adds fine noise, which is the worst possible input for LZW. That is how a GIF ends up both larger and visibly worse than a JPG of the same photo.
Will the converted GIF be animated?
No. A TIFF is a still-image format — there are no frames in it to preserve, so a TIFF always converts to a single static GIF. Animation has to be authored somewhere else, from a sequence of images or a video. A multi-page TIFF is not an animation either; see below.
My TIFF has several pages. Why did I only get the first one?
Multi-page TIFFs hold pages, not frames — the format is used this way for scanned documents and faxes, where each page is a separate sheet of paper with no timing between them. The converter takes the first page, which is what a browser would show if it could open the file. To convert the other pages, split the TIFF first in ImageMagick, GIMP, or Preview and convert each page on its own.
Does the GIF keep transparency?
If the TIFF has an alpha channel, yes — but only as a hard on/off mask. GIF transparency is a single palette entry meaning "draw nothing here", so a pixel is either fully transparent or fully opaque with no in-between. The converter puts the cut-off at 50% alpha: anything more transparent than that disappears, anything less becomes solid. Soft shadows and feathered edges therefore come out with a jagged rim. If you need a smooth alpha channel, use TIFF to PNG instead.
What kinds of TIFF can this open?
Uncompressed, LZW, PackBits, and Deflate TIFFs; RGB, grayscale, palette, bilevel (Group 3/Group 4 fax), and CMYK images; 8-bit and 16-bit samples; big-endian and little-endian files; and multi-page documents. That covers essentially everything a scanner, a camera, or Photoshop will hand you. The notable exceptions are JPEG-compressed TIFFs and the rarer YCbCr and CIELab colour models: those, and any other variant the decoder cannot read correctly, are refused with an error rather than converted, because a decoder that guesses produces a picture that is wrong without looking broken. Re-save such a file as an uncompressed RGB TIFF and it will convert normally.
Are my files uploaded to a server?
No. Chrome and Firefox cannot display a TIFF at all, so unlike most conversions on this site the file is decoded in JavaScript on your own machine rather than handed to the browser, and the GIF is assembled there too. Nothing is uploaded, there is no sign-up, no watermark, and no file limit — which is precisely why a confidential scan or a client's artwork is safe here in a way it is not on a tool that wants your file on its server.