How to convert PDF to TIFF without uploading it
Every "free" online PDF-to-TIFF converter you've used uploads your document to a company server, converts it there, and — in several documented cases — keeps a copy or a live download link for days. For contracts, payslips, medical letters, and anything you wouldn't post publicly, that's an unnecessary risk. The safer approach is to convert the file where it already is: on your own device.
This tool does exactly that. When you drop a PDF here, your browser:
- Checks the file is really a PDF — by its %PDF magic bytes, not its
name — and that pdf.js can open it, so a corrupt or truncated file is refused with a
clear message instead of producing broken images. A JPEG renamed to
.pdfis refused the same way, and a PDF renamed to.txtstill converts. - Reads the page count and sizes and shows you a preview thumbnail of each selected page, so you can see what will convert before anything is rendered.
- Renders each selected page to canvas with pdf.js at your chosen DPI, flattens any transparency onto your chosen background colour, and encodes it as an 8-bit RGB TIFF with a pure-JavaScript encoder — LZW, PackBits or uncompressed, all lossless, every pixel stored exactly — then chains the pages into one multi-page TIFF per PDF (or one TIFF per page, if you picked that). Your original PDF is never modified, and no page is ever sent anywhere.
What makes this converter different
The pages that top the results for this search mostly convert on a server, cap free conversions per day, or ask for an account — and the dedicated options we found each cover only part of the job: PDF I Like states no batch, DPI, page-range or compression choice; SJ Creation is a single-tool site with no stated batch or DPI choice; Coolutils converts online at roughly 96–150 DPI only, one file at a time with no batch; and the big names — Foxit cloud, MConverter, PDF Candy — all convert on their servers. None of them combines all of it — batch conversion, page ranges, DPI choice, a compression choice, a multi-page TIFF, a background-colour choice, per-page previews and a ZIP — with no daily limits, no account and no watermark. This page is the only dedicated client-side PDF-to-TIFF page we found that combines a batch of 20 PDFs with page-range selection (All, single page, or a custom range like "1-5, 8"), a DPI choice of 72/150/300, a compression choice of LZW (lossless, default), PackBits or uncompressed, one multi-page TIFF per PDF, a background-colour choice that transparent areas are flattened onto, per-page preview thumbnails, per-page downloads and a ZIP of the whole batch — with no daily limits, no account and no watermark — plus a live network-request counter so you can verify the privacy claim yourself. It runs entirely in your browser — there is no server to upload to.
When is PDF-to-TIFF the right choice?
Whenever the destination expects TIFF — print shops, archives, scanners, fax and OCR workflows, and compliance systems that file whole documents as multi-page TIFFs. TIFF is also the right pick when you need every pixel exactly as rendered, with no lossy artefacts at all: LZW and PackBits are both lossless, so the pixels that come back are the pixels that were rendered. For anything else — the web, email, slides, social media — a JPG or PNG is the better choice, because the files are a fraction of the size: the same 300-DPI A4 page that is about 26 MB as an uncompressed TIFF might be under a megabyte as a JPG. And if the destination accepts PDFs, keep the PDF — a TIFF throws away the text layer and can never be searched or re-flowed.
Honest limitations
No text layer
Each TIFF is a rasterized render of a page — a picture, not the page itself. The text is not searchable and cannot be selected or copied from it. Copy the text from the PDF first if you need it.
TIFF files are much larger
TIFF stores every pixel as 3 bytes — LZW compresses that losslessly, but the files still show it. A 300-DPI A4 page is about 26 MB uncompressed (LZW shrinks text pages substantially, photo pages less so), and a 50-page PDF at 300 DPI can make a ZIP well over a gigabyte. A TIFF can never be sharper than the PDF page it was rendered from, so pick the lowest DPI that still looks sharp for your use.
Transparency is flattened
An 8-bit RGB TIFF has no alpha channel, so transparent areas of a page are always flattened onto your chosen background colour (white by default). Pages with a solid background are unaffected. If you need transparency kept, convert to PNG.
8-bit RGB only
Each page is stored as 8 bits per colour channel in RGB — no 16-bit depth, no CMYK, no alpha channel. That covers print, archive, scan and fax workflows; if you need 16-bit or CMYK TIFFs, use desktop software instead.
No password-protected PDFs
Password-protected PDFs are refused, and this tool never asks for a password. Remove the password in a desktop PDF tool first, then convert the unlocked copy.
Embedded images are not extracted
Each TIFF is a render of a whole page. The original photos embedded inside a PDF are not pulled out — extracting them is a separate job.
Memory-bound in the browser
Very large or page-heavy PDFs are memory-bound: 25 MB per file, 20 files per batch, 200 pages per PDF — and a page over 40 megapixels at the chosen DPI is refused outright (convert it at a lower DPI instead). Split a bigger PDF into smaller files first. Fonts render via pdf.js — rare exotic fonts may substitute.