Turn a 6 MB scan into a file you can actually email
TIFF is what scanners and cameras produce when nothing is allowed to be thrown away. That is why a single scanned A4 page can run to several megabytes and why the attachment bounces. Converting to JPG fixes it, and the numbers are not subtle: a real 1240 by 1754 scan at 150 DPI went from 6.22 MB to 166 KB here, a reduction of 97.4 percent, in well under a second.
Most of that gain comes from TIFF usually being stored uncompressed. There is no clever trick involved. JPEG simply discards the detail the eye is least likely to miss, and on a page of text or a photograph that adds up quickly.
Every page of a multi-page scan, not just the first
A TIFF can hold many pages in one file, which is exactly what a document feeder produces. Most converters quietly hand you page one and say nothing, so you find out later that eleven pages are missing.
Tick "Convert every page" and each page comes back as its own numbered JPG in a single ZIP, in order: scan-1.jpg, scan-2.jpg, and so on, zero padded to the width of the last page so a 12 page document sorts correctly as scan-01 through scan-12. Leave it off and you get page one, with the page count reported on the result so you always know what was in the file. The option only appears when the file you selected is a TIFF.
How much smaller, and what it costs
Three levels put the trade in plain words. On the same A4 scan, Best quality (JPEG quality 92) produced 217 KB, Recommended (quality 82) produced 166 KB, and Smallest (quality 62) produced 129 KB. The cost shows up as small errors along sharp edges: the worst pixel moved 14 out of 255 at Best quality, 34 at Recommended, and 79 at Smallest.
On a photograph you would never notice any of that. On black text against white paper, an error of 79 is a visible grey halo around the letters.
If your TIFF is a text scan, read this first
JPEG was designed for photographs, and it puts faint halos around hard black-on-white edges. For scanned documents there is a better answer on this site, and it is not close: on the same scan, PNG came out smaller than every JPEG level and mathematically identical to the source. If your TIFF is a contract, an invoice, a form, or anything mostly made of text, use the PNG converter linked below instead.
16-bit scans come out as images, not blank pages
Archive and medical scanners often write 16 bits per channel instead of 8. Software that simply truncates those values turns the whole page white, which is a silent way to lose a scan. Here the samples are rescaled to 8-bit by the depth the file itself declares, so 12-bit and 14-bit scanner output lands correctly too, and the result carries a note telling you the rescale happened.
Transparency becomes white, not black
TIFF files often carry an alpha channel and JPEG has none at all. The usual failure mode in other converters is transparent areas silently turning black, which on a scanned logo looks like the tool is broken. Here they are composited onto a real background colour, white by default, so a logo with a transparent border comes back on white paper rather than a black rectangle.
Colour, and what happens to your file
The embedded colour profile is preserved by default, so a scan calibrated for print does not come back with shifted colours, and one setting converts to sRGB when that is what you need. The image keeps its original dimensions. Convert one file or a whole batch, returned as one ZIP. Free, no account, no watermark, and finished files are deleted after an hour.
What you get
- A large reduction in size on ordinary scans: 6.22 MB down to 166 KB on our test file
- Convert every page, which returns one numbered JPG per page of a multi-page TIFF instead of dropping the rest
- 16-bit scans rescaled rather than clipped, so an archive scan is not returned as a blank page
- Three named quality levels, with the exact JPEG quality number shown alongside the result
- Transparent areas composited onto white or a colour you pick, never onto black
- Original dimensions and the embedded colour profile, both kept
What's next?
For scanned text, TIFF to PNG is both smaller and lossless on the same file. To keep the TIFF format and reduce the size, use Compress TIFF. To keep a multi-page scan together as one document, TIFF to PDF is the one to use.