Your scanner spit out a multi-page TIFF. The receiving end — a court, an insurance company, a hospital intake — wants PDF. You don’t want to install Adobe Acrobat for a one-off file, and uploading scanned medical or legal records to a random web service is a non-starter.
The browser converter handles TIFF (single and multi-page) natively, using the utif decoder for the image data and pdf-lib for the PDF wrapping.
Why this should be local
The use cases for TIFF — medical imaging, court records, legal scans, financial archives — are exactly the use cases where third-party hosting is most fraught. EU GDPR, US HIPAA, India DPDP, Brazil LGPD all create real liability around routing patient or citizen data through a third-party converter. Browser-side conversion sidesteps that question entirely.
Three-step convert
- Open TIFF to PDF.
- Drop a
.tifor.tifffile (single or multi-page). - The converter decodes each frame and shows a thumbnail of each page.
- Set page size (default Auto matches the scan), JPEG quality for the embed (default 92, drop to 75 for smaller files).
- Click Generate PDF. Done.
What’s preserved
- Page order — multi-page TIFFs convert one-to-one (frame 1 → page 1, frame 2 → page 2, etc.)
- Resolution — scans at 300 DPI stay at 300 DPI in the PDF
- Bit depth — 1-bit black-and-white (faxed forms), 8-bit grayscale, 24-bit color all preserved
- Page dimensions — physical size of each frame, matched to A4 / Letter / etc.
When NOT to use this
If the TIFF is enormous (think gigapixel microscopy or satellite imagery), the browser may run out of memory before finishing. For files over ~500 MB:
- Down-sample first using a desktop tool (ImageMagick:
convert input.tif -resample 300 smaller.tif) - Or process in batches: split the multi-page TIFF into chunks of 20 pages
For everyday office scans, 50-100 MB files convert smoothly in any modern browser.
Workflow chains that come up often
Legal/contract scan → searchable PDF:
- TIFF to PDF (here)
- OCR PDF — adds a searchable text layer
- Sign PDF — esign if the doc needs your signature
- Email or upload to the destination
Medical record archival:
- TIFF to PDF (here)
- PDF to PDF/A — archival-grade ISO format if required by retention policy
- Add Page Numbers — for chart pagination
Court filing:
- TIFF to PDF (here)
- Watermark PDF — case number, filer name (required by some jurisdictions)
- Compress PDF — many courts cap upload size at 25-50 MB
Every step stays in the browser.
Why “Save as PDF” from the scanner driver isn’t always enough
Most scanner drivers can output PDF directly. Why convert via the browser at all? Common reasons:
- Old TIFFs you already have (from years of archived scans)
- A colleague’s scanner output you received via email
- A multi-page fax-to-email service that delivers TIFFs
- Re-converting a TIFF after a previous PDF got lost or corrupted
For any TIFF that already exists, the browser converter is the fastest way to get the PDF you needed.
Use TIFF to PDF: Convert TIFF images to PDF in seconds. No signup, nothing uploaded.
Frequently asked questions
Three big places: (1) Office and home scanners — many default to multi-page TIFF, especially for fax/legal workflows; (2) Medical imaging (DICOM-derived archival), microscopy, GIS satellite imagery; (3) Pre-press / printing industries because TIFF supports lossless compression at very high bit depths. If you got a multi-page TIFF, it almost certainly came from a scanner or a fax.
TIFF supports multiple pages (frames) inside one file. The converter walks each frame in order and turns it into a corresponding PDF page. Compression schemes are handled automatically: G3/G4 (CCITT Fax) for black-and-white scans, LZW and JPEG for grayscale/color.
Not by default — the TIFF is treated as image data. If you want the resulting PDF to be searchable (selectable, copyable text), run **[OCR PDF](/ocr-pdf)** on the converted PDF as a second step. OCR also runs in your browser.
The TIFF's source DPI (typically 300 for scans) is preserved as the embedded image resolution in the PDF. Page dimensions default to A4 / Letter to match the scan's physical size; if your scan is at a different DPI you can override page size in the converter.
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