Melt guide

Convert a TIFF to JPG on Mac

TIFF files are huge and not every app opens them. Here's how to convert a TIFF to JPG on macOS, natively or in bulk.

4 min read

A photographer or scanning service sent you a folder of TIFFs and each one is 50+ MB. You need them as JPGs to email to a client, post on a site, or send anywhere that doesn’t accept the format. The conversion is straightforward — the question is how painfully you want to do it.

Why you’d convert

TIFF is lossless and large by design. A 6000-pixel-wide TIFF photo is often 30–80 MB. The same photo as JPEG at quality 85 is usually 1–3 MB and looks visually indistinguishable for most purposes. JPEG is also accepted everywhere; TIFF is rejected by a lot of upload forms.

The native way: Preview

For a single file, Preview works fine:

  1. Double-click the TIFF to open in Preview.
  2. File → Export.
  3. Pick JPEG from the Format dropdown.
  4. Set quality (the slider).
  5. Save.

Tedious for a folder of 50.

The native way: sips

For batches, sips is the answer:

sips -s format jpeg -s formatOptions 85 scan.tiff --out scan.jpg

Folder-wide:

mkdir jpg
for f in *.tif *.tiff *.TIF *.TIFF; do
  sips -s format jpeg -s formatOptions 85 "$f" --out "jpg/${f%.*}.jpg"
done

Quality goes 0–100; 85 is the standard sweet spot. Drop to 75 for smaller files, push to 92+ for archival JPEGs.

The faster way

Drag the folder into Melt, set output to JPEG, set quality, click Compress. You can also resize at the same time — if your TIFFs are scans at 600 DPI and you just want web-sized JPEGs, knock the dimensions down in the same pass. Download Melt.

Bulk convert in Melt

  1. Open Melt.
  2. Drag the TIFF folder in.
  3. Set output format to JPEG.
  4. Pick quality — 85 for sharing, 92 for archive copies.
  5. Optionally resize to 2000–3000px on the long edge if dimensions are huge.
  6. Click Compress.

What you lose, what you keep

TIFF → JPEG is lossy and one-way: you cannot get the lossless data back from the JPEG. If your TIFFs are 16-bit, you drop to 8-bit. CMYK becomes RGB. Multi-page TIFFs become single-page JPEGs of the first frame. EXIF data is preserved by default; strip it via Melt if you’re publishing.

Keep the TIFF originals (external drive, archive folder) and treat the JPEGs as a working copy. Storage is cheap; re-scanning is not.

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