About TIFF to PDF
TIFF is the old workhorse of scanning. Flatbed scanners, document feeders, fax software and records systems have produced it for decades, often packing a whole multi-page document into a single .tif file. Most people who receive those files would rather have a PDF, which previews on any phone and attaches to email without anyone asking which program opens it. This converter makes that PDF from your TIFFs.
Browsers can’t display TIFF on their own, so pd00 includes a small JavaScript TIFF decoder that reads the file inside the page. When a TIFF holds several pages, every one of them is converted and they follow one another in the PDF. Each page is placed on white and stored as a JPEG image, which is how even an enormous uncompressed scan becomes a manageable document.
Scans tend to be big. A color letter-size page scanned at 600 dpi contains over 30 million pixels, and stored uncompressed it takes roughly 100 MB. By default the converter scales each page so its long edge is 2,560 pixels, which keeps text legible both on a monitor and in print while cutting most of that weight. Choose 4096 px in the size menu if you want more of the scan’s fine detail.
How to use TIFF to PDF
- Add the TIFF filesDrop .tif or .tiff files onto the page, or select them in the file picker. Single-page and multi-page TIFFs can share a batch of up to 500 files.
- Choose the layoutPick Letter or A4 for documents that may be printed, or Fit to photo to match the shape of each scan. Order by file name to follow your scanner’s numbering.
- Convert and downloadProduce a single combined PDF, or pick the one-PDF-per-image option when you need separate files. The result downloads straight from the page.
When people use it
A fax that arrived as a TIFF
Fax-to-email services and fax software commonly deliver incoming faxes as multi-page TIFFs. Convert the attachment and every page ends up in one PDF that most offices and online forms will accept.
Digitizing a box of paper records
Your scanner software saved each sheet as scan_001.tif, scan_002.tif and so on. Sorting by file name puts them in sequence, and you get one PDF per batch instead of hundreds of loose image files.
Archive scans too heavy to email
Exports from document archives and high-resolution photo scans are often uncompressed TIFFs of tens of megabytes each. Converting at the default size, or at 1920 px for a lighter file, produces a PDF small enough to share.
Black-and-white scans and fax pages
Fax machines and document scanners often save pages in pure black and white with a compression designed for exactly that, which keeps the TIFFs very small. JPEG is built for photographs, not crisp two-tone text, so a PDF made from those pages can end up larger than the TIFF and show a faint gray haze along letter edges. Setting quality to 100 keeps the haze to a minimum. Color and grayscale scans work the other way round: there the PDF is usually far smaller than the source.
Page order and multi-page files
- Pages inside a multi-page TIFF stay together, in their original sequence.
- File-name sorting reads numbers naturally, so scan_2 comes before scan_10 even without leading zeros.
- Date order uses a capture date when the file has one and otherwise falls back to the file’s last-modified time.
- Order added keeps exactly the sequence in which you selected or dropped the files.
Pages scanned upside down or sideways can be fixed afterwards with Rotate PDF, and a stack fed into the scanner back to front can be flipped with Reverse PDF.
Memory, metadata and when not to convert
Everything is decoded in your device’s memory, so a stack of uncompressed 600 dpi scans is a heavier job than a pile of phone photos. A desktop or laptop copes best; on a phone, convert big archives in smaller batches. Scanner details stored in TIFF tags, such as the device name, are not carried into the PDF. Page dimensions come from the size you pick rather than from the resolution recorded in the file, so with Fit to photo the long side of every page is 11 inches.
- The PDF is image-only. Until it goes through OCR, you can’t search or copy the scanned text; OCR PDF adds that text layer.
- If you need an archival PDF with exact pixel data, this isn’t the right tool, since pages are stored as JPEG.
- TIFF has many internal variants, and an unusual one may not decode. Re-saving the file from the scanning software as a standard TIFF or as PNG usually helps.
- A PDF that is still too big can be slimmed further with Compress PDF.
Scans often contain personal records, so it matters that they stay put: the TIFFs are processed in the browser tab and never uploaded, as the verification guide shows.