Why only the first page of a TIFF shows, and how to see the rest

A TIFF can hold any number of images, one after another, each in its own directory in the file (an IFD), with each directory pointing to the next. A viewer that only wants a picture reads the first directory, shows it and stops, so pages two onwards are in the file but never drawn. On Windows 11 the Photos app does this. Windows Photo Viewer, Preview on a Mac, and dedicated viewers such as IrfanView and XnView show every page. TIFF shows them all in the browser tab and saves them as pictures or as one PDF, which is usually what the person who sent the file should have sent.

Why TIFF works this way

TIFF, published by Aldus as TIFF 6.0 in 1992 and maintained by Adobe since, was built for scanners and fax machines, which is why multi-page documents still arrive in it. The file begins with a header pointing to the first image file directory; each directory lists its image’s size, resolution and compression and ends with the position of the next directory, or zero if it is the last. A multi-page TIFF is that chain. Nothing in the header says how many pages there are: a program has to follow the chain to find out, and a program written to show one picture has no reason to.

Pages can also be coded differently within one file. Fax pages are usually 1-bit black and white in CCITT Group 3 or Group 4 coding; scans may be LZW, Deflate or JPEG. A viewer that handles one coding and not another shows some pages and not others, or a blank.

On Windows

• Photos (the default in Windows 11) shows the first page only; Microsoft’s Q&A forum has had this question for years.
• Windows Photo Viewer shows every page, with arrows to move between them. It is still present on many Windows 10 and 11 machines. Right-click the file, Open with, and look for it in the list, or under Choose another app.
• IrfanView and XnView MP are free for non-commercial use and show multi-page TIFFs with page controls.

On a Mac

Preview shows every page of a TIFF in its sidebar, like a PDF; choose View → Thumbnails if the sidebar is hidden.

In the browser

Browsers other than Safari do not display TIFF at all. TIFF reads the file in the tab with UTIF.js and shows each page with its size, resolution and coding: uncompressed, LZW, PackBits, Deflate, JPEG and the CCITT fax codings, in grey, colour, palette and CMYK. The file is read on your own device and not sent anywhere, which matters for the documents that tend to arrive as TIFFs: medical records, faxed contracts, scanned identity papers.

From there it saves the page shown, or every page in a zip, as PNG (exact) or JPEG (smaller), or all of them as one PDF with each page sized from the TIFF’s own resolution, so a 200 dpi fax page comes out at the paper size it was scanned from.

Looking at every page is free. Saving pages or the PDF is part of OBSCURA Pro, or US$1 to save from one tool for a day.

If you are the one sending it

Send a PDF. Every computer and phone opens every page of a PDF; many still show one page of a TIFF. Most scanner software offers PDF directly, and it can hold the same compressed images, so the file need not be larger. If the recipient needs the text, a scan with a text layer is more useful still; OPTIC reads the words from a scanned page.