TIFF is what professional scanners, fax software, medical devices and print workflows have written for decades, and no web browser will display one. Double-click a .tif on most computers and you get either nothing or whichever application last claimed the extension. Converting to JPEG makes the file ordinary again.
TIFF is a container, not really a format
This is why TIFF support is so inconsistent everywhere, and worth knowing if a file fails. The extension describes a wrapper that can hold almost anything: uncompressed data, LZW, PackBits, Deflate or JPEG compression, in RGB, CMYK, greyscale, palette or pure black and white, at 1, 8, 16 or 32 bits per channel, with the bytes in either order. Two files both correctly called TIFF can have almost nothing in common internally.
The common combinations all work here. If a file is rejected, it is usually an unusual compression scheme or a CMYK variant from a print workflow — re-saving it as uncompressed or LZW from whatever produced it almost always fixes it.
Multi-page files give you page one
TIFF can hold many images in one file, which is why scanners and fax systems like it — a twenty-page document becomes a single .tif. A JPEG holds exactly one picture, so only the first page is converted. If you need every page, PDF is the right target rather than JPEG.
Expect the file to get dramatically smaller
- Uncompressed TIFF scans are frequently 50–200 MB. As JPEGs they routinely land under 2 MB.
- For photographic scans, quality 85 is usually indistinguishable at normal viewing size.
- For scanned documents and text, use 92 or higher — JPEG softens sharp edges and small print suffers first.
- If the scan is an archival master or is being measured rather than looked at, convert to PNG instead so the pixel values stay exact.
A note on very large scans
High-resolution TIFFs have to be fully decoded into memory before they can be re-encoded, and a 200 MB scan can exceed what a browser tab has available — especially on a phone. If a conversion stops with a memory message, that is a device limit rather than a fault in your file; the same conversion usually succeeds on a desktop.
Everything happens in this tab on your own machine. That matters here more than for most formats, because TIFFs tend to be scanned documents: contracts, medical records, identity papers. None of it is transmitted anywhere.