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TIFF to PNG
Convert TIFF to PNG Online — Free, No Upload
Decode TIFF and save the first page as a lossless PNG, transparency kept.
About TIFF to PNG
TIFF is what scanners, fax gateways and print workflows write, and a single .tif routinely holds more than one image: a two-sided scan, a multi-page fax, a bracketed exposure set. Safari is the only browser that opens a TIFF on its own; everywhere else nothing happens at all. So this page decodes the file with the utif2 library and re-encodes the result as PNG, identically in every browser rather than leaning on the one that has a decoder. Two things follow, and both are worth knowing before you start. The first is that only the first page comes out. The decoder is asked for page 0, and rather than let a nine-page scan arrive as one image with no explanation, the tool counts the pages the file declares and tells you how many it found. If you need the others, this is not yet the tool for them. The second is what PNG gives you that JPG does not: it is lossless, so the pixels the TIFF decoder produced are written without a second, lossy pass over them, and an alpha channel survives the trip. That is the right choice for a scanned line drawing, a logo lifted out of a print file, or anything with flat colour and hard edges, where JPG's ringing shows immediately. Colour comes out as 8-bit sRGB, so a 16-bit-per-channel TIFF is reduced to 8 bits on the way through. Batch conversion is supported, and everything runs in this tab; the file is never uploaded.
Questions
My TIFF has several pages — do I get all of them?
No. Only the first page is converted, and the page says so on screen, naming the number of pages it counted in your file rather than leaving you to notice the loss later. That matters more here than for most formats, because scans and faxes are routinely multi-page and nothing on the outside of the file tells you. If you need the whole document rather than its first sheet, TIFF to PDF keeps every page in one file.
Why PNG rather than JPG?
Because a TIFF is usually the archival copy and PNG is the format that keeps it that way. PNG is losslessly compressed, so the pixels that come out are the pixels the decoder read; JPG would add compression artifacts to exactly the things a scan is full of — text edges, line art, ruled tables. If the file is a photograph and you want it small, TIFF to JPG is the page for that trade.
Why can't most browsers open a TIFF on their own?
Safari is the only one that can — MDN lists TIFF as "Safari only" — and everywhere else the format never became a web format: it is enormous, and it carries dozens of optional compression schemes a browser would have to ship code for. This page does not depend on that difference. It decodes the file with utif2, a JavaScript TIFF reader served from this site, and re-encodes the result as a PNG through the canvas, the same way in Safari as in everything else. Nothing is uploaded; the decoder runs beside your file rather than the other way round.
Will the PNG be smaller than the TIFF?
Usually, but not always, and it depends entirely on how the TIFF was written. An uncompressed TIFF — still the common case out of scanners and microscopes — shrinks a lot, because PNG deflates the pixels and the TIFF did not. A TIFF that already used LZW or Deflate lands somewhere near the same size. The page shows the IN and OUT byte counts so you get the real answer for your file rather than an average.
Does transparency survive the conversion?
Where the decode produces it, yes — PNG carries a full alpha channel, so nothing is flattened onto a background the way a JPG conversion would flatten it. What does not survive is everything that is not pixels: TIFF tags, embedded ICC profiles, geo-referencing and layer information are all read past, because the output is written from the decoded raster.
Is my file uploaded to a server?
No. Transmute processes everything locally in your browser using JavaScript and WebAssembly. Your files never leave your device — there is no server, no upload, no cloud processing.