TIFF is lossless, alpha, and several images inside a single file. GIF is a palette of at most 256 colours, all-or-nothing transparency, and animation. ImageMagick sits between the two, and this page says exactly what happens to a TIFF file on the way to becoming a GIF one.
What runs when a TIFF file becomes GIF
ImageMagick 6.9.12, on a machine we rent and watch. Your TIFF file is uploaded once, ImageMagick runs once, the GIF comes back, and neither file is kept. TIFF to GIF 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 TIFF into the GIF
The pixel dimensions of your TIFF file. The GIF comes out the size the TIFF went in, because nothing on this path resizes anything.
What TIFF to GIF costs you
Colour depth. GIF holds 256 colours at most, so a photographic TIFF gets quantised and its gradients band.
If a model is going to read the GIF
A GIF file is pixels, and pixels are expensive for a model to read. Handed this GIF, an assistant spends its budget looking at the picture rather than reading it, and it will paraphrase what it thinks it saw. If your TIFF is mostly words, the useful move is to pull the text out of it, not to change which picture format holds it.
TIFF to GIF, measured rather than promised
Running TIFF to GIF against the real engine with a real file, ImageMagick wrote 3,512 bytes of GIF in 0.1 seconds, machine otherwise idle. That is one TIFF file on one day and not an average, which is why the number is given together with the file that produced it.
The TIFF to GIF 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 GIF file has anything inside it.
The same TIFF file, sent somewhere else
Other outputs the probe measured out of a TIFF file, so the cost of choosing GIF can be read against something. Sizes do not compare across engines, because each family was probed with its own TIFF witness file.
TIFF to PDF: 118,721 bytes in under a tenth of a second, verified by a format signature.
TIFF to JPG: 1,568 bytes in under a tenth of a second, verified by a format signature.
TIFF to PNG: 815 bytes in under a tenth of a second, verified by a format signature.
TIFF to WEBP: 370 bytes in under a tenth of a second, verified by a format signature.
Other ways into GIF, and what they measured
Among the published routes into GIF, TIFF is the number 15 largest output of the 19 measured. The witness files differ, so this ranks the probe run and not your document.
WEBM to GIF: 177,876 bytes in 0.1 seconds.
WMV to GIF: 182,516 bytes in 0.1 seconds.
PNG to GIF: 3,512 bytes in 0.1 seconds.
MP4 to GIF: 164,004 bytes in 0.2 seconds.
WEBP to GIF: 4,744 bytes in 0.1 seconds.
What we will not pretend about TIFF to GIF
A TIFF file over 25 MB is refused before the upload finishes rather than after it, so you do not wait for a rejection.
A TIFF to GIF 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 TIFF anywhere on this path. Converting a picture to GIF 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 TIFF to GIF, not a marketing number.
One TIFF file at a time, chosen in the browser. There is nothing else to set up and nothing else on offer.
TIFF to GIF: what people ask
What actually converts my TIFF file to GIF?
ImageMagick does it, 6.9.12, on a machine we rent and watch. Not a browser trick and not somebody else service: the TIFF file is uploaded once, ImageMagick runs once, the GIF comes back, and neither file is kept afterwards.
How long does TIFF to GIF take?
On the file the probe used, ImageMagick took 0.1 seconds and wrote 3,512 bytes of GIF. That is one real measurement on one real TIFF file, not an average and not a promise about yours: a larger TIFF takes longer, and past 30 seconds the run is stopped.
What do I lose going from TIFF to GIF?
The one to know about first: Colour depth. GIF holds 256 colours at most, so a photographic TIFF gets quantised and its gradients band.
Does the GIF come out the same size as the TIFF?
The same pixel size, yes: nothing on this path resizes anything, so the GIF is as wide and as tall as the TIFF 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 TIFF to GIF free?
There is a free allowance every month, and one TIFF to GIF 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 GIF.