I agree, one will lose quality converting tiff to jpg back to tiff.

We experienced with batch converting tens of thousands of tiffs to PDF 
for a newspaper digitization project. For us we found that though Image 
Magick does convert, the output PDF file sizes were huge to retain a 
decent  quality PDF.  We ended up using poppler 0.20.5 on mac.

In separate projects we have used Adobe Bridge to batch output a tiff 
image per page in PDF.

regards,
Monica

On 4/26/2013 3:32 PM, Steve Cherry wrote:
> Yes, converting from JPG to TIFF would have the quality of a JPG and 
> (I believe) the file size of a TIFF.
>
> On 4/26/13 4:19 PM, James Gilbert wrote:
>> I'm by no means an expert in the math behind image format conversions...
>> but:
>>
>> When converting to TIFF-to-JPG, TIFF is uncompressed formatting and 
>> JPG is
>> compressed format.
>>
>> When back converting, wouldn't the original quality of TIFF would be 
>> lost,
>> converted only to the quality of the last JPG (with degradation on 
>> each time
>> this process occurs)?
>>
>> James Gilbert, BS, MLIS
>> Systems Librarian
>> Whitehall Township Public Library
>> 3700 Mechanicsville Road
>> Whitehall, PA 18052
>> 610-432-4339 ext: 203
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf 
>> Of Roy
>> Sent: Friday, April 26, 2013 4:15 PM
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] tiff2pdf, then back to pdf?
>>
>> If you can stand an extrastep, Ed, there are tools to convert PDF to jpg
>> images, and from there it shouldn't be too hard to get TIFF output. Do a
>> search for "convert PDF to image" to get started. There are tools 
>> that are
>> not online only, which I'm pretty sure is what you're after.
>>
>> Roy Zimmer
>> Western Michigan University
>>
>>
>> On 4/26/2013 4:08 PM, Edward M. Corrado wrote:
>>> Hi All,
>>>
>>> I have a need to batch convert many TIFF images to PDF. I'd then like
>>> to be able to discard the TIFF images, but I can only do that if I can
>>> create the original TIFF again from the PDF. Is this possible? If so,
>>> using what tools and how?
>>>
>>> tiff2pdf seems like a possible solution, but I can't find a
>>> corresponding "pdf2tif" program that reverses the process.
>>>
>>> Any ideas?
>>>
>>> Edward
>