About the TIFF to Text
Scans and faxes are often saved as TIFF, and the text inside them cannot be copied, searched or edited. This tool reads the text out of TIFF files with optical character recognition in your browser. Choose the language, press the button and get editable text you can copy or download as a .txt file. Multi-page TIFFs are read page by page, and several files can be read in one go. The recognition runs on your own device with the same engine as our PDF OCR tool, so your scans are never uploaded.
Updated October 2026
How to use the TIFF to Text
- 1Press Select TIFF files, or drop your scans on the page.
- 2Choose the language of the text, or up to three languages.
- 3Press Read the text. The first run downloads the reader, which takes a moment.
- 4Wait while each page is read. Use Stop if you change your mind.
- 5Check the text, fix mistakes, then copy it or download a .txt file.
Why OCR for TIFF scans
A scan is a picture of text, not text. Without recognition you cannot search it, quote it or fix a typo. OCR looks at the shapes of letters and turns them back into characters. For archives of old letters, invoices and faxes saved as TIFF, it is the quickest way to make them useful again.
Getting good results
Scan quality decides most of the accuracy. Scan at 300 dpi, keep the page straight, use black text on a light background and avoid shadows from the page edge. If the first read is poor, rescan at a higher resolution or clean the picture in an image editor first.
- 300 dpi or more for normal print
- Straight pages, no folds or shadows
- Choose the right language, add a second only if needed
- Use black and white or grayscale scans
Several languages
Documents with two languages, such as English and French, can be read with both selected. Reading with more languages takes longer and can introduce small errors in single-language text, so keep the selection as small as you can.
A quick example
Say you have a 12-page TIFF of a contract. Select English, press Read the text and wait. A few minutes later you have 12 sections of text, each starting with its page number. Copy the text into a document, fix the few mistakes the engine made and keep the TIFF as your proof.
Phone and computer
On a phone, reading can be slow for large multi-page scans, so keep the screen on and use Wi-Fi for the first download. On a computer it is faster, and you can read several TIFF files in one run. Large pages are scaled down to 4200 pixels on the longest side.
Good to know
OCR reads printed text far better than handwriting. Tables and columns can come out in an odd order, which you may need to tidy. The text is editable in the box before you copy it, and nothing is stored once you close the page. Text recognition works best on clean scans, and other tools handle the next step. Use PDF OCR for scanned PDFs, TIFF to PDF to make a document from the image, and PDF to Text for PDFs that already hold text.
Features
- Multi-page TIFF support
- Eight languages, up to three at once
- Several files at once
- Editable result you can copy or download
- Progress bar and Stop button
- Private: nothing is uploaded
Frequently asked questions
How accurate is the text?
Printed text in a clean 300 dpi scan is usually read very well. Faded, skewed, small or handwritten text produces mistakes, so always check numbers and names.
Does it read multi-page TIFF files?
Yes. Every page is read in turn and the text is separated with a heading for each page.
Which languages are supported?
English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Hindi and Arabic. Choose up to three if a document mixes languages.
Why does the first run take longer?
The recognition engine and language data, a few megabytes, are downloaded once and kept by your browser.
Can it read fax TIFFs?
Standard TIFFs yes. TIFFs saved with fax compression or JPEG-in-TIFF cannot be opened here; convert them to PNG first.
Are my scans uploaded?
No. The recognition runs entirely in your browser.