Why TIFF files are so big
TIFF is a flexible format used by scanners, printers, archives and professional photographers. It often stores images with no compression or with lossless compression, sometimes with 16 bits per color channel. That keeps every detail, but a single scanned page can take tens of megabytes.
JPG uses lossy compression tuned to what human eyes notice. At high quality it looks almost the same on screen while taking a small fraction of the space.
TIFF can also store several pages in one file, CMYK colors for printing and many different compression types. That flexibility explains why one app opens a TIFF perfectly while another refuses it. JPG has no such surprises.
When TIFF to JPG makes sense
- Sharing scans of documents, receipts or old family photos by email or chat.
- Uploading to websites and portals that accept only JPG or PNG.
- Viewing on a phone, where TIFF support is often missing.
- Building a web gallery from archive images.
Keep your TIFF originals if you plan to print large or edit heavily later. Treat the JPG as your everyday sharing copy.
Tips for scanned documents
For pages of text, a quality between 80% and 90% keeps letters readable while saving a lot of space. Scanning at 300 DPI is enough for most documents. Higher settings mostly add file size.
Need all pages in one file? Convert the JPG pages with the JPG to PDF tool afterwards. If a portal has a strict size limit, run each image through Compress Image, which can aim for a target such as 100 KB.
For old photo prints, a 600 DPI scan leaves room to print larger later. Keep that scan as your TIFF master and convert a copy to JPG for family chats and social media.