GIF is a palette of at most 256 colours, all-or-nothing transparency, and animation. TIFF is lossless, alpha, and several images inside a single file. ImageMagick sits between the two, and this page says exactly what happens to a GIF file on the way to becoming a TIFF one.
What runs when a GIF file becomes TIFF
ImageMagick 6.9.12, on a machine we rent and watch. Your GIF file is uploaded once, ImageMagick runs once, the TIFF comes back, and neither file is kept. GIF to TIFF is one of the 3649 pairs that engine was probed on with a real file, which is why it has a page here and why the pairs the probe could not prove do not.
What survives from the GIF into the TIFF
The pixel dimensions of your GIF file. The TIFF comes out the size the GIF went in, because nothing on this path resizes anything.
What GIF to TIFF costs you
Nothing measurable, which is rare enough to say plainly. GIF and TIFF carry the same kind of content with the same fidelity, so this pair changes the container and not the picture. What does change is the size, and often by a lot.
If a model is going to read the TIFF
A TIFF file is pixels, and pixels are expensive for a model to read. Handed this TIFF, an assistant spends its budget looking at the picture rather than reading it, and it will paraphrase what it thinks it saw. If your GIF is mostly words, the useful move is to pull the text out of it, not to change which picture format holds it.
GIF to TIFF, measured rather than promised
Running GIF to TIFF against the real engine with a real file, ImageMagick wrote 848,536 bytes of TIFF in 0.2 seconds, machine otherwise idle. That is one GIF file on one day and not an average, which is why the number is given together with the file that produced it.
The GIF to TIFF verdict was reached by a format signature, meaning at least four bytes unique to the format were found at the right offset. Which check was used matters, because they do not all prove the same thing, and a status code of 200 proves nothing whatsoever about whether the TIFF file has anything inside it.
The same GIF file, sent somewhere else
Other outputs the probe measured out of a GIF file, so the cost of choosing TIFF can be read against something. Sizes do not compare across engines, because each family was probed with its own GIF witness file.
GIF to PDF: 1,092,578 bytes in 0.9 seconds, verified by a format signature.
GIF to JPG: 20,559 bytes in under a tenth of a second, verified by a format signature.
GIF to PNG: 3,894 bytes in under a tenth of a second, verified by a format signature.
GIF to MP4: 54,682 bytes in 0.3 seconds, verified by ffprobe.
GIF to WEBM: 49,644 bytes in 2.0 seconds, verified by ffprobe.
GIF to AVI: 164,982 bytes in 0.2 seconds, verified by ffprobe.
Other ways into TIFF, and what they measured
Among the published routes into TIFF, GIF is the first largest output of the 10 measured. The witness files differ, so this ranks the probe run and not your document.
HEIC to TIFF: 90,264 bytes in under a tenth of a second.
HEIF to TIFF: 90,264 bytes in under a tenth of a second.
ICO to TIFF: 96,278 bytes in under a tenth of a second.
SVG to TIFF: 2,464 bytes in under a tenth of a second.
WEBP to TIFF: 72,264 bytes in under a tenth of a second.
What we will not pretend about GIF to TIFF
A GIF file over 25 MB is refused before the upload finishes rather than after it, so you do not wait for a rejection.
A GIF to TIFF run that passes 30 seconds is killed, and the ImageMagick process is killed with it. A run left behind would sit on one of the machine's two cores until somebody noticed.
No text is read out of the GIF anywhere on this path. Converting a picture to TIFF never turns it into words, whatever the picture happens to contain.
ImageMagick was not saturated at sixteen simultaneous conversions: it held 47.5 a second while latency moved from 0.22 s to 0.34 s, and the service memory did not move off 51 MB. That is the measured headroom behind GIF to TIFF, not a marketing number.
One GIF file at a time, chosen in the browser. There is nothing else to set up and nothing else on offer.
GIF to TIFF: what people ask
What actually converts my GIF file to TIFF?
ImageMagick does it, 6.9.12, on a machine we rent and watch. Not a browser trick and not somebody else service: the GIF file is uploaded once, ImageMagick runs once, the TIFF comes back, and neither file is kept afterwards.
How long does GIF to TIFF take?
On the file the probe used, ImageMagick took 0.2 seconds and wrote 848,536 bytes of TIFF. That is one real measurement on one real GIF file, not an average and not a promise about yours: a larger GIF takes longer, and past 30 seconds the run is stopped.
What do I lose going from GIF to TIFF?
The one to know about first: Nothing measurable, which is rare enough to say plainly. GIF and TIFF carry the same kind of content with the same fidelity, so this pair changes the container and not the picture. What does change is the size, and often by a lot.
Does the TIFF come out the same size as the GIF?
The same pixel size, yes: nothing on this path resizes anything, so the TIFF is as wide and as tall as the GIF was. The number of bytes is a different question and usually moves a long way, which is normally the reason for doing this at all.
Is GIF to TIFF free?
There is a free allowance every month, and one GIF to TIFF conversion costs half a credit against it. When the allowance runs out the tool says so and stops, rather than quietly handing you a worse TIFF.