What is a TIFF File...?

TIFF is the short form of Tagged Image File Format. TIFF was developed by the Aldus Corporation in collaboration with various other contributors in 1986. It is a bitmapped image format that supports various resolutions. A TIFF file contains descriptive information about the image. A TIFF file is identified by a .tiff or a .tif file extension. 

TIFF file formats are used for storing very large, high quality images. TIFF is the favored image format in many graphic applications. These include image manipulation programs, desktop publishing and 3-D imaging applications. Other applications that use TIFF is optical recognition software and scanning and faxing applications. A TIFF version called GeoTIFF is used to store geo-referenced raster imagery.

A TIFF file can have a maximum size of 4GB. This file size limitation is one of the drawbacks of TIFF. To get around it and to exceed the size boundary, the creation of a new TIFF file format called the BigTIFF file format has been proposed. 

The TIFF format specifies a number of tags to store information about the image. User applications can extend the TIFF format by defining their own tags to describe images. The TIFF specification is readily extensible, but writing customized tags for specific applications may make file sharing difficult between different applications. It is best to use extensions that are independent of specific applications and can be readily accepted by a variety of programs.

TIFF images come in many types, including four baseline types. There is the black and white bilevel image, the grayscale image, the palette or indexed image and the RGB image. While the color scope of palette images and gray scale images is limited to 8 bits or 256 colors, the number of colors that RGB images can display run to 24 bits or 16.7 million colors and even the billion strong 48 bits. TIFF can also support images in YcbCr and CMYK formats.

As TIFF files are very large, they often need to be compressed to smaller sizes for the sake of portability. TIFF files can be compressed using, amongst others, Huffman compression, JPEG or JBID compression and LZW compression. Compression of a TIFF file does not affect the image quality.

For web use, TIFF files are usually converted to jpeg or jpg and bmp formats. These formats are faster to load. They are also more readily read by web browsers than the various TIFF extension formats.