TIFF to PDF

Multi-page TIFFs are the main case this converter is built for. A TIFF is a container holding one or more image directories, and the decoder walks all of them, so a twenty-page fax archive or a twenty-page flatbed batch becomes a twenty-page PDF in the original order. Each decoded page appears as a thumbnail with its pixel dimensions before you download anything, which is the quickest way to confirm nothing was lost or reordered. Pages inside one TIFF may differ in size — mixed letter and legal scans are common — and with the Match image setting each PDF page takes its size from its own image rather than from the first one. Single-page .tif files work in exactly the same way and simply produce a one-page PDF. Large batches of high-resolution scans are limited only by the memory your browser has available.

Uncompressed, LZW, PackBits and CCITT Group 3 and Group 4 fax compression all decode. That covers the overwhelming majority of what scanners, fax servers and document management systems emit — CCITT Group 4 in particular is the standard bilevel format for faxes and archives. JPEG-in-TIFF, and especially the obsolete OldJPEG variant, may fail to decode; when that happens you get an explicit error saying the file may be damaged or use an unsupported compression, rather than a silently blank page. The workaround is to re-save the file from whatever produced it, choosing LZW or uncompressed, or to export the pages as JPEGs and use Images to PDF instead. Compression only decides whether a page decodes at all — once decoded, every page is re-encoded as PNG on the way into the PDF.

Every page is flattened to 8-bit RGBA before it is embedded, whatever the source stored. A 1-bit bilevel fax scan becomes black-and-white RGB pixels: visually identical, but a noticeably larger file, because one bit per pixel turns into several bytes. Channels deeper than 8 bits are reduced to 8 bits each, which is invisible on scanned documents and matters only for measurement or imaging work. Separated colour spaces such as CMYK, and unusual photometric interpretations, depend on the decoder's conversion and can come out with shifted colour or fail outright. Transparency survives, because pages enter the PDF as PNG rather than JPEG. In every case the thumbnails are your check: they come from the same decoded pixels that go into the PDF.

No — a PDF made from a TIFF contains pixels, not characters, so you cannot select, search or copy the text in it. The conversion is deliberately faithful: it re-wraps your scan without trying to interpret it, which is what you want when the file is evidence, an archival record, or anything else that should not be silently reinterpreted. To make the result searchable, run it through PDFChamp's OCR PDF tool afterwards; that adds an invisible recognised-text layer behind the picture, so the page still looks identical while search, copy-paste and text extraction begin to work. Keeping the two steps apart is intentional — recognition takes far longer than the conversion, its quality depends on the scan, and it should be something you choose rather than something that happens to your document unasked.

Match image sizes each PDF page from the picture itself, capped so the long edge never exceeds A4's long edge — that stops a 4,000-pixel scan from becoming an absurdly large page while keeping the aspect ratio exact. A4 and Letter instead give every page the same standard sheet, scaling the image down to fit inside it and centring it, never enlarging it past its natural size. With a fixed sheet the Orientation setting applies: Auto turns a page landscape whenever its image is wider than tall, while Portrait and Landscape force one orientation throughout. Orientation is greyed out under Match image, because there the page already takes its shape from the picture. Choose Match image for faithful archiving, and A4 or Letter when the output has to print or file uniformly.

The converter is free and your TIFF never leaves your computer. The file is read from disk by the browser, decoded page by page inside the tab, and rebuilt as a PDF locally, so no scan is transmitted, stored or queued — there is no upload endpoint to receive one. That is worth saying plainly for this format in particular, because TIFFs are overwhelmingly scans: medical imaging, land registry documents, legal exhibits, engineering drawings, archived correspondence. There is no account, no page limit and no size tier; the practical ceiling is how much memory your browser can give a large multi-page scan. The PDF you download carries no watermark, no stamp and no visible credit line, and the tool behaves identically in a private window and a normal tab.