TIFF, or Tagged Image File Format, is a graphics format for storing images. It is often used to store digital photographs, and it is also used by fax and scanning software. Converting a TIFF file into a JPEG file isn't too hard, but you need some software that probably isn't already on your compute. In this guide I'll show you one way to convert a TIFF to a JPEG.

Using ImageMagick to Convert a TIFF to a JPEG

ImageMagick is a collection of programs for creating and editing lots of different graphics formats. It also includes a tool called "convert" for converting between different formats. ImageMagick's "convert" tool can be used to convert TIFF files to JPEG files as well as performing other operations like scaling, cropping, and even changing colors.

To use ImageMagick for converting TIFF files to JPEG files, you'll need to install ImageMagick first. ImageMagick is a command line tool, so we'll be using the command line to convert our images. In these examples, let's suppose that we want to convert an image called "photo.tiff" to a JPG file "photo.jpg". We can simply do

convert photo.tiff photo.jpg

Pretty easy, huh? We can do other things, like scale the input file. This might be useful, for example, if your digital camera creates huge files. Suppose you want to make a JPG file one third of the size of the input TIFF file. We can use convert's "-scale" option:

convert photo.tiff -scale 33% photo.jpg

If we want to create an image with a fixed width but the same aspect ratio as the input image, we can use the "-resize" option. This option takes a width and height separated by an "x". If one of the width or height is left off, convert automatically scales the missing dimension to match the aspect ratio of the original image. For example, to create a JPEG version of the photograph that is 250 pixels wide and has the same aspect ratio of the original image, we can do

convert photo.tiff -resize x250 photo.jpg

ImageMagick can do lots more than just converting TIFF files to JPEG. Here are some more examples of what ImageMagick can do. You may also be interested in converting PDF files to JPEG.  Have fun!