TIFF files tend to arrive from somewhere specific: a flatbed scanner, a print shop, a university archive, or an export from Photoshop or a document-management system. Inside those professional workflows the format is a fine choice — it holds high-fidelity image data and every serious imaging tool reads it. The trouble starts the moment a TIFF needs to live outside that world. Browsers will not display it inline, most chat and email previews choke on it, and content-management systems frequently reject it outright. If you just need people to see the image, TIFF is working against you.
PNG is the natural landing spot. Like TIFF, it is a lossless format, so switching costs you nothing in image quality — every pixel in the source appears unchanged in the output. Unlike TIFF, it opens instantly in every browser, operating system, office suite, and CMS in common use. It also compresses well: a scanned document or diagram that occupies tens of megabytes as an uncompressed TIFF often lands at a fraction of that size as a PNG, with no visual difference at all. Transparency survives the trip too, since PNG has full alpha-channel support.
Convertmaxxing performs the conversion entirely inside your browser using WebAssembly. Your TIFF is never uploaded — the file is decoded and re-encoded on your own machine, which matters when the scans are contracts, medical records, or anything else you would rather not hand to a stranger's server. There is no account to create and nothing to install — the engine downloads once (about 5 MB) and is cached by your browser, so later conversions start instantly. You can also choose to strip embedded metadata during conversion if the file's history should stay private.
Because both formats are lossless, there are no quality settings to weigh — drop the file in, download the PNG, and move on. The only real consideration is size: photographic TIFFs can still produce fairly large PNGs, since lossless compression can only do so much with continuous-tone imagery. For scans, diagrams, screenshots, and anything with flat areas of color, though, expect a dramatically smaller file.
Why convert TIFF to PNG?
- PNG displays natively in every browser and app, while TIFF fails to load in most non-professional software
- The conversion is fully lossless — every pixel of the TIFF is preserved exactly
- PNGs are typically far smaller than uncompressed TIFFs, making them practical to email, embed, and publish
- Alpha transparency carries over intact, since PNG supports it fully
- Conversion runs locally in your browser, so confidential scans and documents never leave your device
How it works
- Step 1
Drop your files
Drag your TIFF files into the converter above, or click “Choose files”. Batches are welcome.
- Step 2
Pick your settings
PNG is preselected. Adjust quality or size if you want, or keep the defaults.
- Step 3
Convert and download
Conversion runs locally in your browser. Download files individually or grab everything as a zip.
Frequently asked questions
- Does converting TIFF to PNG lose any image quality?
- No. TIFF and PNG are both lossless formats, so the conversion is a straight repackaging of the pixel data. The PNG you download renders identically to the original TIFF — there is no compression damage, color shifting, or softening, and no quality setting you need to worry about.
- My TIFFs are confidential scans — do they leave my computer?
- They never do. The conversion runs as WebAssembly inside your browser, so decoding and encoding both happen on your own hardware. There is no upload step, no server-side processing, and no copy of your file anywhere but your device.
- Will the PNG be smaller than my TIFF?
- Usually, and often dramatically so. Many TIFFs are stored uncompressed or lightly compressed, while PNG applies efficient lossless compression to everything. Scanned documents, diagrams, and screenshots shrink the most. Photographic content compresses less, because continuous-tone imagery gives lossless algorithms less repetition to work with — the PNG will still be lossless, just not tiny.
- What happens to the metadata embedded in my TIFF?
- You decide. TIFFs from scanners and editing software often carry metadata about the device, software, and capture settings. During conversion you can optionally strip that metadata from the output, which is a sensible step before publishing a scan of anything sensitive.