PDF to TIFF
Render pages as TIFF, multi-page and at the resolution you need.
This tool runs entirely in your browser. Your file is never uploaded, and you can verify that in your browser's network tab. Verify it yourself: open your browser's network tab and watch. You will see one small request asking whether you have tasks left - a tool name and a hash, never the file.
What this does
TIFF is not a format anyone picks for pleasure. People arrive here because a court filing system, a medical archive, a records department or a fax gateway will accept nothing else, usually at 300 dpi and often bilevel. So this renders each page at the resolution you set and writes it into a TIFF, by default as one multi-page file rather than a folder of separate ones.
Use it when something on the other end has specified TIFF: an e-filing portal, a document management system that only indexes TIFF, an archive with a retention standard written before PDF existed, or a fax service that takes image files.
How it works
- Drop the PDF onto this page. Files up to 300 MB are accepted, because scans run large.
- Set the resolution. 300 dpi is what most filing systems ask for; 200 is enough for on-screen review and 600 is for archival capture of fine detail.
- Choose colour, gray or bilevel. Bilevel is the black-and-white setting those systems usually mean, and it is what keeps the file small.
- Leave One multi-page file on unless the receiving system genuinely wants a separate image per page.
- Press Convert to TIFF and download the result.
Bilevel is the setting that decides whether the result is manageable. An A4 page at 300 dpi is about 8.7 million pixels, which is roughly 25 MB of colour data before compression; bilevel packs eight pixels into a single byte and brings the same page down to a little over one megabyte before compression, and to a few hundred kilobytes after it. The polarity is handled correctly, which matters more than it sounds - white has to be zero, and getting that backwards produces a negative of the page.
Pages are rendered to PNG on the way out of the renderer and then re-encoded into the TIFF, rather than passing through JPEG first. That avoids throwing away detail in a lossy step that nobody asked for, which is the sort of quiet quality loss an archival conversion should not contain.
Compression is deflate or none, and nothing else. Deflate is lossless, widely readable and does well on text pages. Group 4 fax compression, which a few older bilevel workflows expect and which would be smaller still, is not written here - if a system rejects the output for that reason, it is the one thing this tool cannot give you.
Rendering happens on your device through PDF.js, and the TIFF is assembled there too. Medical and legal documents are the usual traffic for this converter, so it is worth being explicit: no page image is produced on a server, and nothing about the file is sent anywhere.
What this tool cannot do
- A TIFF is pixels. Text stops being selectable and searchable the moment a page is rendered, so nobody will find a word in the result.
- Deflate is the only compression offered, so a colour TIFF at 300 dpi is many times the size of the PDF it came from. JPEG and Group 4 fax compression are not written.
Questions people ask
- Why would I want a TIFF instead of a PDF?
- Almost always because something else insists. Court e-filing portals, hospital records systems, some government archives and fax gateways were built around TIFF and have not moved. If nothing is demanding TIFF of you, a PDF is the better file in every respect.
- What does bilevel mean and should I use it?
- Bilevel means one bit per pixel: every pixel is black or white, with no grays in between. It is what most filing systems mean when they ask for black-and-white TIFF, and it makes a 300 dpi page a few hundred kilobytes instead of tens of megabytes. Use it for text documents and forms; do not use it for photographs or shaded diagrams, where it discards everything between black and white.
- Can I get one file for the whole document?
- Yes, and that is the default. All the pages are written into a single TIFF as chained image file directories, which is what document management systems expect. Turn the option off if you specifically need one image file per page, and each one is numbered with leading zeros so they sort correctly.
- The TIFF is enormous. What should I change?
- Two settings, in this order. Switch the colour mode to bilevel if the document is text, which is the single biggest saving - roughly an eightfold reduction over gray. Then drop the resolution: 200 dpi is a quarter of the pixels of 400 dpi, and is usually enough unless you were told otherwise.
- Is my document sent anywhere to be rendered?
- No. Every page is rasterised in a Web Worker in your browser and the TIFF is assembled there, so a medical record or a court exhibit never leaves your device. Nothing is uploaded regardless of file size, and there is no queue to wait in.