The lossless upgrade path for TIFF files
TIFF and PNG are both lossless, but only one of them is viewable everywhere. Browsers, phones, chat apps and upload forms all display PNG natively; none of them display TIFF. Converting TIFF to PNG therefore changes nothing about the image and everything about what you can do with it: the same pixels, now openable on any device made in the last twenty-five years. The PNG specification has been stable since 1996, which is why it became the web's standard lossless format while TIFF stayed in scanners and print shops. If universal viewing matters more than perfect pixels, TIFF to JPG produces even smaller files at the cost of slight, usually invisible, compression.
Best for scans, line art and documents
The files that benefit most from PNG are the ones TIFF was built for: scanned contracts, forms, technical drawings, sheet music, and anything dominated by text and hard edges. Run those through JPG and the compression leaves visible fuzz around every letter, because JPG was tuned for smooth photographic gradients, not black-on-white strokes. PNG has no such failure mode; a scanned page comes out exactly as it went in, and it typically shrinks too, since flat white paper compresses extremely well losslessly. Note that multi-page TIFFs convert their first page only. Once your files are PNG, the PNG to JPG tool can produce lightweight sharing copies later without touching your lossless masters.
Common questions
Is TIFF to PNG conversion really lossless?+−
Yes. Most TIFFs store pixels losslessly, and PNG is a lossless format too, so this is a lossless-to-lossless conversion: every pixel value in the decoded TIFF is written into the PNG exactly. Nothing is approximated or thrown away, which makes PNG a safe replacement when you no longer want to keep the bulky TIFF original.
Why choose PNG instead of JPG for my scans?+−
JPG compression smears sharp edges, which is exactly what scanned text, line art and diagrams are made of. The result is faint halos and fuzz around letters. PNG reproduces those edges perfectly, so scans of documents, forms, blueprints and drawings stay crisp. For photographic content where small artifacts are invisible, JPG is the smaller choice.
What happens with a multi-page TIFF?+−
Only the first page is converted. TIFF can hold many pages in one file, which scanners use for multi-page documents, but PNG holds exactly one image. If your file has several pages and you need them all, convert the document to a PDF instead, or split the TIFF into single pages first and convert each one.
Will the PNG be smaller than the TIFF?+−
Usually yes, often much smaller, because many TIFFs are stored uncompressed while PNG always applies lossless compression. Scanned documents with lots of white space compress especially well. Dense photographic scans shrink less, and in rare cases a TIFF that already used strong compression can produce a PNG of similar size. Either way the pixels are identical.