TIFF to BMP Converter

How to Convert TIFF to BMP Online

1. Upload Your TIFF File: Drag and drop your .tif or .tiff file into the dropzone, or click "+ Add Files" to browse. Batch upload is supported — convert multiple TIFF scans at once.
2. Pick Quality Preset: Default is High. The Quality preset dropdown (High / Medium / Low) controls the internal rendering pipeline before the pixels are written out — BMP itself is uncompressed, so the preset mainly affects intermediate processing of layered or compressed TIFFs.
3. Set Image Resolution (Optional): Keep original dimensions, scale by percentage, set a preset (1080p / 768p / 720p / 480p), or enter a custom Width / Height (pixels or %). Useful when the source TIFF is a high-DPI scan that would produce a multi-hundred-MB BMP at native size.
4. Convert and Download: Click "Convert". Files process on our servers and download to your browser — no sign-up, no watermark, no email required.

Why Convert TIFF to BMP?

TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) is the workhorse of professional scanning, medical imaging, and print prepress — it can pack lossless compression (LZW, ZIP, PackBits), multiple pages, alpha channels, and rich metadata into a single file. BMP (Windows Bitmap), introduced with Windows 1.0 in 1985 and standardized through versions tied to Windows 2.x, 3.x, 95, and NT, is the opposite philosophy: a simple, uncompressed device-independent bitmap with a 14-byte file header plus a 40-byte (or larger) DIB header followed by raw pixel rows. You convert TIFF to BMP when a downstream tool only speaks plain bitmaps:

• Legacy Windows applications and embedded tools — older imaging SDKs, CNC/laser engraver software, ultrasound viewers, lab instrument controllers, and industrial vision systems often accept only uncompressed BMP. Anything written against the Win32 GDI bitmap API reads BMP natively without an image library.
• Microsoft Paint and classic Windows workflows — Paint on Windows 10/11 still opens and saves BMP without recoding; sharing a scan with a colleague on a locked-down Windows machine that has no third-party image viewer is the most common case.
• Game asset pipelines and pixel-perfect art — older game engines, sprite editors (GraphicsGale, Aseprite import), DOS-era tooling, and some texture importers expect raw BMP with a known bit depth (1, 4, 8, 16, 24, or 32 bpp).
• Scientific and forensic imaging — when you need every pixel byte to be exactly what came out of the sensor, uncompressed BMP guarantees no LZW round-trip artifacts; TIFF's compression flags can sometimes be misinterpreted by older readers.
• OCR pre-processing — some on-prem OCR engines (older Tesseract builds, Kofax classic, Abbyy FineReader command-line) work most reliably on 1-bit or 8-bit grayscale BMP after thresholding a scanned TIFF.
• Splash screens, icons, and Windows installer bitmaps — WiX, InstallShield, and the Windows boot logo pipeline still want BMP for legacy reasons.

If you also need the reverse direction, see BMP to TIFF. For web-friendly output instead, TIFF to JPG or TIFF to PNG will give you a fraction of the file size.

TIFF vs BMP — Format Comparison

BMP Bit Depth & Header Quick Guide

Notes: classic BMP headers (BITMAPINFOHEADER, 40 bytes) cover bit depths 1–32 without alpha. The alpha channel was added in BITMAPV4HEADER, which shipped with Windows 95 and is supported by Photoshop 7+ and Microsoft Office 2000+. Many legacy BMP readers silently ignore the alpha byte.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is my BMP so much larger than the original TIFF?

Because most TIFFs ship with LZW, ZIP, or JPEG compression inside the file, while BMP is essentially raw pixel data plus a small header. A 24-bit 4000x3000 photograph is ~36 MB as BMP no matter what — the file size is simply width × height × bytes_per_pixel + ~54 bytes of headers. If your source TIFF was 8 MB LZW-compressed and your BMP is 36 MB, that is the expected ~4-5x expansion, not a bug.

Will the BMP file lose any image data compared to the TIFF?

No — both formats can be fully lossless. Going from a lossless TIFF (uncompressed, LZW, ZIP, or PackBits) to a 24-bit BMP is a pixel-perfect transcode at the same bit depth. The only way to lose data is if the source TIFF was 16-bit per channel and you're writing 24-bit BMP (8 bpc) — that truncates the extra precision. Most photographs are 8-bit per channel anyway, so this rarely matters.

Does BMP support transparency like TIFF and PNG?

Sometimes. The classic BITMAPINFOHEADER (the most widely supported variant) has no alpha. Microsoft added an alpha channel in BITMAPV4HEADER with Windows 95, and it works in Photoshop 7+, Microsoft Office 2000+, and the Windows XP-and-later theme system. But many image viewers and legacy tools silently ignore the alpha byte and render the BMP fully opaque. If you need reliable transparency, use TIFF to PNG instead.

My multi-page TIFF only produced one BMP — where are the other pages?

BMP is strictly one image per file. Multi-page TIFFs (common output from scanners and fax software) get split: we convert the first page by default. If you need every page as a separate BMP, upload the TIFF, run the conversion, then run it again on remaining pages — or convert the multi-page TIFF to PDF first and then export each page.

What bit depth will the output BMP use?

By default we match the source TIFF's effective channel count: a 24-bit RGB TIFF becomes a 24-bit BMP, a grayscale TIFF becomes an 8-bit BMP. If your TIFF has an alpha channel, the output is a 32-bit BMP using the BITMAPV4HEADER variant. We don't downscale 48-bit (16 bpc) TIFFs to 8 bpc unless you request it — the conversion stays at 24 bpp by truncating the low byte per channel.

Can I open a BMP on macOS or Linux, or is it Windows-only?

You can open it anywhere. Preview on macOS reads BMP natively; GIMP, ImageMagick, Photoshop, Affinity Photo, Pixelmator, and every major image viewer on Linux (Eye of GNOME, gThumb, feh) handle it. BMP originated on Windows but the format is well-documented and universally readable. The reason to use it on macOS or Linux is almost always because some downstream tool — not the OS — demands BMP.

Why doesn't BMP have an EXIF section like my TIFF does?

The classic BMP headers were designed in 1985–1995 before EXIF existed (EXIF was first standardized in 1995 by JEIDA and adopted broadly in the late 1990s). There is no standard place in a BMP file for camera make/model, GPS, capture timestamp, or color profile. If you need to preserve metadata, stick with TIFF or use TIFF to JPG — JPEG carries EXIF natively.

Is there a file-size limit on the output BMP?

Yes — BMP stores the file size in a 4-byte field in its 14-byte file header, giving a theoretical maximum of 4 GB. In practice, many editors and OS tools treat that field as signed, so anything over ~2 GB risks being rejected. For huge scientific or print scans (gigapixel imagery), keep the data in BigTIFF instead — classic TIFF tops out at 4 GB but BigTIFF (spec: 2007; LibTIFF 4.0 stable: December 2011) supports up to 16 exabytes.

What's the difference between BMP and DIB?

A DIB (Device Independent Bitmap) is the in-memory pixel format that Win32 GDI passes around; a BMP file is just a DIB on disk with a 14-byte BITMAPFILEHEADER prepended. They share the same pixel layout and DIB header. Some Windows SDK examples and clipboard formats refer to bitmaps as DIBs even when they end in .bmp — for practical purposes the two terms are interchangeable.