Everything you need to know about TIFF
TIFF (Tagged Image File Format, .tiff or .tif) is the professional photography and printing industry's standard. Created by Aldus in 1986 and now owned by Adobe, it's a flexible container that can hold lossless or lossy data, multiple pages, and exotic color spaces (CMYK, Lab, multi-spectral). Every print shop, every scanner, every medical imaging device speaks TIFF.
How it works under the hood
- Tag-based metadata. Every property of a TIFF is a numbered tag (256 = ImageWidth, 258 = BitsPerSample, etc.) - the format is infinitely extensible without breaking older readers.
- Compression options. TIFF supports None (raw), LZW (lossless), JPEG (lossy embedded), ZIP, PackBits, and the modern CCITT Group 4 (used for fax/B&W scans).
- Multi-page. A single TIFF can hold multiple images - used for multi-page document scans and image stacks (medical CT/MRI).
- Color space flexibility. RGB, CMYK, Lab, grayscale, indexed - whatever you need for print, scientific imaging, or remote sensing.
Where you'll actually use it
- Print production (CMYK TIFFs are the standard for press)
- Document scanning (multi-page TIFF for archival)
- Medical imaging (DICOM is built on TIFF foundations)
- Satellite imagery and GIS (GeoTIFF extension)
How it compares to alternatives
TIFF vs PNG: TIFF for print (CMYK), PNG for web (sRGB). TIFF vs PSD: PSD is editable layered Photoshop; TIFF is the flat deliverable. TIFF vs JPG: Use TIFF for archival, JPG for delivery.
Things that will trip you up
- Browsers do NOT support TIFF natively - convert to JPG/PNG for any web display
- TIFF files can be 10-50x larger than equivalent JPGs - storage adds up fast for photo libraries
- Some older TIFF readers don't handle big-endian/little-endian byte order correctly - test with the target tool
Test it yourself: Adobe Photoshop, GIMP, `tiffinfo` from libtiff, ImageMagick. For programmatic work, Pillow (Python) handles most TIFF variants.