How to use
- Drop a .tif or .tiff file onto the drop area, or click to choose one.
- Keep the original format to encode the TIFF unchanged. The preview may stay empty in browsers that cannot display TIFF.
- In Safari, you can instead convert the image to PNG, JPEG or WebP for use on a web page.
- Copy the raw Base64 or the data URI, or download the output.
About TIFF
TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) was created in 1986 and is now maintained by Adobe. It is the workhorse of scanning, faxing, printing, publishing and archiving because it is so flexible: images can be uncompressed or use LZW, Deflate, JPEG or CCITT Group 4 compression for black and white documents, can have 16 bits per channel, and a single file can hold many pages. GeoTIFF adds map coordinates for GIS data.
The MIME type is image/tiff. The Base64 starts with SUkqAA for little-endian files (byte order mark II) or TU0AKg for big-endian files (MM).
Browser support
Safari is the only major browser that displays TIFF. In Chrome, Edge and Firefox the preview and dimensions may be missing, and conversion to PNG, JPEG or WebP is not possible, because those browsers cannot decode the image. The Base64 output is still correct: it is computed from the raw file bytes, not from a decoded picture. When Safari does convert a multi-page TIFF, only the page it displays, normally the first, ends up in the result.
Sending TIFF files to an API
The most common reason to encode a TIFF is to send a scanned document to a web service: OCR engines, document management systems, e-invoicing platforms and fax gateways often accept the file as a Base64 field in JSON. Most of them want the raw Base64 output without the data: prefix.
{
"fileName": "scan-001.tif",
"contentType": "image/tiff",
"content": "SUkqAAgAAAA..."
}Scans can be tens of megabytes, and Base64 adds a third, so check the size limits of the API. For display on a web page, convert to PNG for text and line art or to JPEG for photos, since a data:image/tiff image only appears in Safari.
Frequently asked questions
Why is there no preview of my TIFF file?
Most browsers cannot decode TIFF, so there is nothing to show. The Base64 output is created from the file bytes and is complete and correct regardless.
Is TIF the same as TIFF?
Yes. Both extensions refer to the same format, and the MIME type is image/tiff in both cases.
Can I convert TIFF to PNG or JPEG here?
Are all pages of a multi-page TIFF kept?
Yes, when you keep the original format, because the whole file is encoded. A conversion keeps only one page.