Convert TIFF to APNG Online

Convert TIFF to APNG: What This Tutorial Covers

This page turns a set of TIFF images into one animated PNG, where each uploaded .tiff/.tif becomes a frame. It is written for people who already have a numbered sequence — rendered frames, microscope or scanner captures, a stop-motion shoot, exported CAD turntables — and want a single file that loops in a browser without a video player. The one thing to know before you start: the animation is built from the number of files you upload, not from the pages inside one file, so a sequence needs two or more TIFFs on the page.

How to Convert TIFF to APNG

1. Upload Your TIFF Files: Drag your .tiff/.tif images onto the page, or use the file picker. Add them in the order you want them played — the list order on the page is the frame order. Upload at least two files if you want motion.
2. Set the Framerate: Open Advanced Options and choose from the Framerate dropdown. It opens on "10 FPS (Recommended)" and ranges from "1 FPS (Slideshow)" to "50 FPS (Max Speed)"; the value you pick becomes the per-frame delay for every frame.
3. Choose Image resolution and Combine mode: Image resolution starts on "Keep original"; switch to Preset Resolutions, Width, Height, Width x Height, or Resolution Percentage to shrink the output. Under "Combine?", "Single animation" (the default) merges every file into one APNG, while "Individual files" converts each upload separately.
4. Convert and Download: Click Convert and save the file. Files are uploaded over an encrypted connection, processed on our servers, and deleted automatically after a few hours. No sign-up, no watermark.

Walk-through: Frame Order, Canvas Size and the Single-File Trap

Three behaviours account for almost every surprising result here.

• Order comes from the upload list, not from the filenames. The converter assembles frames in the order the files sit in the list on the page. Zero-padded names (frame_001.tif … frame_012.tif) are still worth using, because that is the order most file pickers hand over, but the list on screen is the authority — check it before converting.
• Mixed frame sizes are letterboxed, never cropped. APNG requires every frame to share one canvas, and the assembler cannot resize. When your TIFFs differ in size, each is scaled with its aspect ratio intact and centred on a canvas as large as the widest and tallest frame in the set, with the leftover margin left transparent. Identical dimensions across the set skip this step entirely, so pre-cropping to one size gives the tightest file.
• One file in means no animation out. The assembler discards duplicate consecutive frames, so a single TIFF produces a valid PNG with no animation control chunk at all — in other words, an ordinary static PNG that happens to be named .apng. That includes a multi-page TIFF: page normalisation reads only the first page (IFD), so a 12-page scan uploaded on its own still yields one frame. Export the pages as separate TIFFs from your imaging application first, then upload them together.

What Each Control Actually Changes

There is no quality slider, no palette-reduction control and no loop-count setting on this conversion: APNG frames are stored losslessly, and the output is always written to loop forever. Frame count, frame size and frame content are the only things that move the file size.

APNG vs GIF vs Animated WebP for a TIFF Sequence

TIFF's strengths — 16-bit channels, CMYK, layered scans, huge dimensions — do not survive the trip. An APNG is 8-bit RGB with 8-bit alpha, so a 16-bit-per-channel scan is reduced to 8 bits per channel and a CMYK TIFF is converted to RGB. If the archival depth matters more than the animation, keep the TIFFs and convert a copy.

Common Errors and How to Fix Them

• "The download doesn't animate" — Almost always a one-file upload, including a multi-page TIFF. Add the rest of the frames as separate files and convert again.
• "The frames play in the wrong order" — The file list order is the frame order. Reorder or re-add the files so the list reads top-to-bottom in playback order before you hit Convert.
• "There are transparent bars around some frames" — Your TIFFs are not all the same size, so smaller frames were centred and padded onto the common canvas. Crop or resize the set to matching dimensions first, or accept the padding.
• "The file is enormous" — Every frame is stored losslessly at full colour. Cut the frame count, or drop Image resolution to a preset; halving each dimension quarters the pixels per frame.
• "Transparent areas turned solid" — APNG keeps whatever alpha the source had, so this means the TIFFs carried no alpha channel (or the transparency was already flattened when they were exported). Re-export with the alpha channel enabled.
• "Colours look duller than the TIFF" — A CMYK or 16-bit TIFF has been converted to 8-bit RGB. That is inherent to the target format, not a setting you can change here.

When This Doesn't Work

A long sequence is the wrong job for APNG. Because frames are stored independently with no motion prediction, a few hundred full-resolution TIFF frames produce a file that no browser will load politely — at that point TIFF to MP4 is the right target and will be smaller by an order of magnitude. If the destination is a chat platform, forum or HTML email where animated PNG is often treated as a still, TIFF to GIF is the safer format despite its 256-colour ceiling. And if you only ever had one image, TIFF to PNG is the honest conversion — it gives you the same static result under the extension people expect.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why did my multi-page TIFF become a single static frame?

Because each uploaded file is normalised to one image before frames are assembled, and that step reads only the first page of a multi-page TIFF. The remaining pages (IFDs) never reach the assembler. Split the document in your imaging application — Photoshop, GIMP, ImageJ/Fiji and tiffsplit all export pages as individual files — and upload the resulting TIFFs together as one batch.

How many TIFF files do I need for an actual animation?

Two, at minimum, and they have to differ from each other. The assembler collapses identical consecutive frames, so uploading the same image twice still writes a file with no animation chunk. Any set of two or more visibly different images produces a real animated PNG.

Does the APNG keep the transparency from my TIFF?

Yes, when the TIFF has an alpha channel. APNG carries a full 8-bit alpha channel — 256 levels of opacity per pixel — so soft edges, drop shadows and partially transparent overlays survive intact rather than being flattened. Nothing is added, though: a TIFF saved without alpha stays fully opaque, and areas that were flattened onto a background before export cannot be recovered.

How long will the finished animation run?

Frame count divided by the framerate. Twenty TIFFs at the default 10 FPS run for two seconds; the same twenty at "1 FPS (Slideshow)" run for twenty. The delay is written as an exact 1/N-second fraction per frame, so there is none of the rounding drift that GIF suffers from storing delays in whole centiseconds.

Can I make the animation play once instead of looping forever?

Not from this page — the output is always written with an infinite loop count. If you need a play-once file you will have to edit the animation control chunk afterwards with a dedicated APNG tool, or use a video target such as TIFF to MP4, where playback repetition is controlled by the player or the HTML attribute rather than baked into the file.

Why is my APNG larger than a GIF of the same frames?

Because APNG stores each frame losslessly at 24-bit colour while GIF quantises every frame to at most 256 colours first. For photographic or gradient-heavy TIFFs that gap is large and expected — you are paying bytes for the colour fidelity and smooth alpha you converted in order to get. For flat graphics with few colours the two land much closer together.

What does "Individual files" under Combine? do to a batch of TIFFs?

It turns off merging: each uploaded file is converted on its own instead of becoming a frame. Since a still TIFF has nothing to animate, you get one static PNG per input, named with the .apng extension. It is only useful when the uploads are already animated sources; for building a sequence from stills, leave it on "Single animation".

Will an APNG open outside a browser?

It opens everywhere a PNG opens, because that is what it is — the animation lives in ancillary chunks that non-animating decoders skip. The PNG Third Edition specification makes that fallback explicit: a decoder that does not recognise the APNG chunks displays the static image. So the worst case in an old viewer or a thumbnailer is your first frame shown as an ordinary PNG, never a broken file. For the reverse trip, APNG to TIFF pulls a frame back out.