Convert TIFF to WebP — Free, Fast & Private
TIFF is an archival and prepress format. It is where scanners, print workflows, fax systems and document management platforms put images they intend to keep at full fidelity — and it is completely unusable on the web, since no browser will display it. Converting to WebP takes a file that only specialist software opens and makes it something any page can serve, usually at a small fraction of the size.
Three things about TIFF change during this conversion, and all three are worth understanding before you convert an archive.
1. Multi-page TIFFs collapse to a single page
TIFF can hold many images in one file, and document scanners use this constantly — a twenty-page contract scanned to a single .tif is entirely normal. WebP holds one still image, so the conversion yields one page, not twenty.
If you are converting scanned documents, this is the detail that will catch you out. For a genuinely multi-page document, a PDF is the right destination rather than any single-image format.
2. CMYK becomes RGB
TIFFs from a print workflow are frequently CMYK — four ink channels, often with an embedded colour profile describing a specific press and paper. WebP is RGB only, so the conversion performs a colour-space transformation.
Expect a shift. CMYK and RGB do not cover the same range of colours, and saturated cyans, deep blues and rich blacks are the usual casualties — they can appear noticeably duller or subtly different in hue. This is a property of the colour spaces, not a defect in the conversion. For screen use it is fine and usually unnoticeable; if the image is going back into print, keep the CMYK TIFF as the master and treat the WebP purely as a web derivative.
3. Bit depth drops to 8 bits per channel
Scanners and professional cameras often write 16-bit-per-channel TIFFs to preserve headroom for editing. WebP stores 8 bits per channel. That is 65,536 levels reduced to 256.
For a finished image this is almost always invisible — 8 bits is what your screen shows anyway. It matters if you intend to keep editing: heavy curve or exposure adjustments on 8-bit data introduce banding that 16-bit data would have absorbed. Edit the TIFF, then convert.
The size difference
Substantial. TIFFs are either uncompressed or use lossless schemes such as LZW or ZIP, so a 300 DPI A4 scan can easily run to 25 MB. As WebP the same page is typically a few hundred kilobytes. For a photographic TIFF, reductions above 95% are routine.
If the scan is mostly text and you need edges to stay razor-sharp, consider a high quality setting or TIFF to PNG for lossless output. For universal compatibility, TIFF to JPG; for the smallest web files, TIFF to AVIF. Everything is processed in your browser, which matters when the scans are contracts, records or client work.