Convert TIF or TIFF to PDF with every page kept

To change TIFF to PDF, select or drop your .tif or .tiff file on this page, choose a Page size and press Convert to PDF. Every page of the TIFF becomes a page of the PDF, in the same order, and the PDF keeps the file's name: scan.tif becomes scan.pdf.

Scanners, fax software and document archives often save pages as TIFF, while upload forms, offices and most people you send a file to expect a PDF. A scan of several pages usually sits in one TIFF file, so before you convert, the page reads it and tells you how many pages it holds. Our guide on what a TIFF file is shows how to open one without converting it.

This TIFF to PDF converter works in current Chrome, Edge and Firefox. The scan stays on your computer, which matters for letters, contracts and ID documents, unless your browser cannot read the file and you choose Convert on our server instead. Going the other way, convert PDF to TIFF to put every page of a PDF into one multi-page TIFF.

Page size starts on A4. Orientation starts on Auto, which gives each page the sheet that suits its shape: landscape when the page is wider than tall, portrait otherwise. A scan that mixes the two keeps both. Pick Portrait or Landscape to make every sheet the same.

Fit to picture reads the resolution saved in the TIFF, so an A4 page scanned at 300 dpi gives an A4 page with no margin. A TIFF that saves no resolution is counted at 96 pixels per inch, and a 300 dpi scan of that kind turns into a page about three times the paper's width and height. When in doubt, pick A4 or US Letter to match the original.

Nothing is thrown away from an ordinary scan unless you ask for a smaller file. This pair is graded Picture-perfect: with Keep every pixel, the choice the page starts on, each page goes into the PDF with every pixel it had, stored with lossless compression, and only a 16-bit or CMYK TIFF is changed, to 8-bit colour. In our test an A4 page at 300 dpi, 2480 × 3508 pixels, was still 2480 × 3508 pixels inside the PDF, so small print stays as sharp as it was in the scan.

Two things change. Any see-through areas turn white. And the words in a scan stay part of the picture: you can read them in the PDF, but you cannot select, search or copy them, because the converter does not recognise text.

That depends on how the TIFF was saved. The PDF stores each page with lossless compression, a colour page as full-colour pixels and a black-and-white page as black and white, so in our tests a colour scan shrank and a black-and-white one grew a little. Chrome and Firefox made files of exactly the same size.

A black-and-white TIFF holds one bit for each pixel, squeezed further by fax compression. The PDF keeps one bit for each pixel too, but packs it with a general compression that does a little less well on a fax page, so it comes out somewhat bigger. If the PDF is too big to email, Compress PDF can make it smaller by saving the scanned pictures at a lower resolution.

For colour photos and scans there is a second way. Under Pictures in the PDF, pick Save as JPG and every page is stored as a JPG at the quality you choose under Compress the pictures, Balanced or Smaller, one JPG page for each page of the TIFF. Our 1600 × 1067 photo-like TIFF made a 3.5 MB PDF with every pixel kept and a 189 KB one as JPG at Balanced. JPG softens small print a little, so for a black-and-white page or a page of fine text, keep every pixel.

Every page of a multi-page TIFF is converted, up to 200 of them from one file. Our three-page colour test file, 28.4 MB as a TIFF, came back as a 23.8 MB PDF of three A4 pages, and the screen said Your 3-page PDF is ready.

The pages are read one at a time, but the finished ones add up in your browser's memory. If a long colour scan holds more pages than your browser can manage, the page says before you convert how many will fit and that the rest are left out, and the result says so again. Black-and-white pages take far less room, so many more of them fit.

Want a picture of each page instead of a PDF? Convert TIFF to JPG and you get one JPG per page, together in a ZIP.

This page makes one PDF for each TIFF. Add up to 100 files at a time, and with two or more, Download all (ZIP) saves every PDF at once.

To put several scans into one PDF, use JPG to PDF. It takes TIF and TIFF files as well as JPGs, up to 200 pictures, in the order you drag them, and every page of a multi-page TIFF becomes a page of the PDF, in that TIFF's place in the order.

Pictures in other formats have pages of their own: convert SVG to PDF for drawings and logos, convert WebP to PDF for images saved from websites, and convert GIF to PDF. For a typed document rather than a scan, convert RTF to PDF and its words stay text you can search and copy.