TIFF to PDF Converter — Convert Scanned TIFF to PDF
Drop your TIFF below and pick PDF as the output format. Every page of a multi-page scan comes through — a ten-page TIFF becomes a ten-page PDF, not a one-page one. Free, private, and entirely in your browser, which is the point when the document is a contract or a medical record.
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.
How to Convert TIFF to PDF Online (Free)
- Drag your .TIF or .TIFF files into the drop zone, or click to browse and select them.
- Choose PDF from the Output Format menu — the converter starts on JPG.
- Raise the quality slider if the scan is text. The 92% default is tuned for photographs; see the table below.
- Download the PDF. With two or more files converted, Combine into one PDF merges them into a single document.
There is no upload, no account, no watermark, and no page limit beyond your own machine's memory. Chrome and Firefox cannot so much as display a TIFF, so the file is decoded in JavaScript on your computer — which also means the converter works with the Wi-Fi off.
Multi-Page TIFFs Become Multi-Page PDFs
This is the part most converters get wrong, and it is worth checking on any tool you use. A document scanner that feeds ten sheets does not give you ten files — it gives you one .tif containing ten pages, because TIFF was built to hold a stack of images in a single container. A converter that treats that file as “an image” keeps the first page and silently discards the other nine. You find out when you open the PDF.
PDF is the one output format on this site that can hold more than one image, so it takes them all. A three-page scan run through the converter above produced a PDF with three pages, each at the source's full 2550 × 3300 pixels. The file list still shows a single row — one file in, one file out — so open the PDF to see the pages.
Two related behaviours, so nothing surprises you:
- Scanner thumbnails are not pages.Some scanners, and Photoshop's “save image pyramid” option, tack a reduced-resolution copy of the image onto the file. TIFF flags those as thumbnails, and they are skipped — a one-page scan will not come back as a PDF padded with small duplicates of itself.
- Every other format still takes page one. A GIF, a JPG, or a PNG holds exactly one image, so TIFF to JPG and its siblings convert the first page of a multi-page document and stop. If you need every page as a separate image, split the TIFF first in ImageMagick or GIMP.
Why TIFF Files Need PDF Conversion
TIFF is what the scanner produces. PDF is what everyone else accepts. Nearly every reason to make this conversion comes down to that gap rather than to anything about the picture itself.
Nothing else will open it
No mainstream browser can display a TIFF — not Chrome, not Firefox, not Edge. Email clients preview it as an attachment icon and Windows shows it in a photo viewer that treats a ten-page contract as a slideshow. Send a client a .tif and you have sent them a file they must go and find software for. Send a PDF and it opens in the tab they already have.
The upload form demands a PDF
Court e-filing systems, insurance claims, university applications, tax portals, and expense tools routinely accept PDF and nothing else — and they want a multi-page submission as one file, not as page-1.tif through page-9.tif. This is the single most common reason people land on a page like this one.
A document is a document, not an image
A PDF page has a physical size, so it prints the same way on every printer, in order, with margins. A TIFF has pixels and a DPI tag that half the software in the world ignores. If the thing you scanned is paper, the format that models paper is the one to file it in.
Archive size
Scans are enormous. A three-page 300 DPI grayscale scan came to 17.7 MB as an LZW TIFF and 24.1 MB with no compression at all, because sensor grain defeats the run-length compression TIFF relies on. The same three pages became an 8.2 MB PDF at the default setting — less than half the size, and openable anywhere. Read the next section before you assume that always holds.
Quality Settings for Scanned Text
A PDF page here does not contain your TIFF — it contains a JPEG, embedded natively, the way PDF has carried scanned pages since the 1990s. The scan is decoded to pixels and compressed once on the way in, and the quality slider controls that encode. It matters more for documents than for photographs, because JPEG is bad at text: it rings around the hard black-on-white edges that letters are made of, and the default 92% is tuned for photos.
Here is the same three-page 300 DPI grayscale scan — 17.7 MB as an LZW TIFF — put through the converter above at three settings. PSNR measures how close each PDF page is to the TIFF page it came from; higher is better, and above roughly 40 dB the difference is hard to see.
| Quality | PDF size | Fidelity | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| 60% | 2.4 MB | 32.4 dB | Visible fringing around letters |
| 92% (default) | 8.2 MB | 39.0 dB | Tuned for photos, not text |
| 100% | 16.4 MB | 58.8 dB | The right choice for documents |
For a document you intend to archive, print, or file with a court, push the slider to 100%. The file doubles, and the text stays crisp. For a photograph or a scanned artwork, leave it where it is.
The exception that surprises people: a bilevel scan — pure black and white, no grays, what fax software and many document scanners produce as a Group 4 TIFF — gets dramatically bigger as a PDF. The three-page fax TIFF tested here is 155 KB. The PDF came out at 2.8 MB, nearly nineteen times larger. Group 4 compresses pure black-and-white text almost perfectly and JPEG cannot come close. Convert it anyway if the portal demands a PDF, but do not expect to save space, and do not blame the converter.
What the slider does not change is resolution. Nothing is downscaled at any setting: a 2550 × 3300 scan is 2550 × 3300 in the PDF, laid on a US Letter page inside a half-inch margin, which works out to roughly 340 DPI on paper. One consequence worth knowing: the margin means a full 8.5 by 11 sheet reproduces at about 88% of life size, so measure before printing a form where physical dimensions matter.
Batch TIFF to PDF Tips
Drop every TIFF in at once. Each becomes its own PDF, and once two or more have converted, a Combine into one PDF button appears beside Download All — it writes a single combined.pdf holding all of them. Multi-page TIFFs contribute every page they have: two three-page scans merged into one six-page document.
- Page order follows the list, not the file names. Browsers hand over a multi-file selection in their own order, which is usually alphabetical but is not guaranteed across operating systems. If the sequence matters — a contract, a numbered set of exhibits — drag the files in a few at a time and watch the list build in the order you want. Clear resets it.
- Set the quality before you drop the files, not after. Each file is converted the moment it lands, using the settings in force at that instant. Changing the slider afterwards does not re-encode what is already in the list.
- A single multi-page TIFF needs no merging. It converts straight to a multi-page PDF, so no Combine button appears — the download you already have is the whole document.
- Merging costs nothing. Each page is compressed once, on the way in, and the merged document re-uses those exact bytes. The pages in
combined.pdfare not a second encode of the individual PDFs — they are the same bytes. - Big batches are limited by memory, not by us. Everything runs in your browser tab, and a 300 DPI page is about 33 MB of raw pixels while it is being converted. Pages are encoded and released one at a time, but a hundred-page job on a modest laptop is still happier split into a few runs. Prefer separate files? Download All gives you every PDF in a ZIP.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does a multi-page TIFF become a multi-page PDF?
Yes, and that is the main reason this page exists. A scanner that feeds ten sheets hands you one .tif holding ten pages, and most browser converters keep the first and quietly discard the other nine. Here every page comes through: a three-page TIFF was converted to a PDF with three pages, each at the source's full 2550 × 3300 pixels. The file list still shows one row, because one file went in and one file came out — open the PDF to see the pages.
How do I combine several TIFFs into one PDF?
Drop them all in at once, pick PDF as the output format, and a Combine into one PDF button appears beside Download All once two or more files have converted. It writes a single document in the order the files are listed, and multi-page TIFFs contribute all of their pages — two three-page TIFFs merged into one six-page PDF. A single multi-page TIFF gets no Combine button, because its own download is already the whole document.
Will the PDF be smaller than the TIFF?
For a photographic or grayscale scan, usually much smaller: a three-page 300 DPI grayscale scan of 17.7 MB became an 8.2 MB PDF at the default quality, less than half the size. For a black-and-white (bilevel) scan, no — and the gap is dramatic. The same three pages saved as a Group 4 fax TIFF are only 155 KB, and the PDF came out at 2.8 MB, nearly nineteen times larger. G4 compresses pure black-and-white text almost perfectly; JPEG, which is what a PDF page carries here, is bad at exactly that kind of hard-edged image.
What resolution does the scan end up at?
Nothing is downscaled — a 2550 × 3300 scan goes into the PDF at 2550 × 3300. It is placed on a US Letter page inside a half-inch margin, which works out to about 7.5 by 9.7 inches of paper, or roughly 340 DPI. That is above the 300 DPI print shops ask for. The side effect is that a scan of a full 8.5 by 11 sheet reproduces at about 88% of life size, so if you are printing a form where physical dimensions matter, measure it before you send it.
Can I search or select the text in the PDF?
No. The page holds a picture of text, not text, so nothing is selectable and Ctrl+F finds nothing. Making the words searchable needs OCR, which reads the characters out of the image and writes them back as an invisible text layer. This converter does not do that, and no browser-only tool does it well. If you need a searchable archive, run the finished PDF through an OCR tool afterwards.
What quality setting should I use for a scanned document?
Raise it. The default of 92% is tuned for photographs, and JPEG rings around the hard black-on-white edges that printed text is made of. At 60% the three-page scan fell to 2.4 MB but the fidelity dropped to 32.4 dB, and the fringing around letters is visible when you zoom in. At 100% it measured 58.8 dB — nearly twenty decibels better than the default — at 16.4 MB. For text you are archiving or printing, the larger file is usually the right trade.
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; both byte orders; and multi-page documents. That covers essentially everything a scanner or Photoshop will hand you. The notable exceptions are JPEG-compressed TIFFs and the rarer YCbCr and CIELab colour models: those are refused with an error rather than converted, because a decoder that guesses hands back a picture that is wrong without looking broken. Re-save such a file as an uncompressed or LZW TIFF and it will convert normally.
Why did my scanner's thumbnail not become a page?
Because it is not a page. Some scanners and Photoshop's "save image pyramid" option tack a reduced-resolution copy of the image onto the file, flagged inside the TIFF as a thumbnail rather than a document page. Those are skipped, so a one-page scan does not come back as a PDF padded with small duplicates of itself.
Are my scans uploaded to a server?
No. Chrome and Firefox cannot open a TIFF at all, so the file is decoded in JavaScript on your own machine and the PDF is assembled there too. Nothing is uploaded, and there is no sign-up, watermark, or page limit. That matters more here than almost anywhere else on this site: the documents people convert to PDF are contracts, medical records, tax forms, and passport scans, and none of them leave your device.
Going the other way — you have a PDF and need images out of it — is covered by PDF to JPG and PDF to PNG. If you want images rather than a document, keep every colour with TIFF to PNG or get something small enough to email with TIFF to JPG.