0.00 GB / 1.00 GB monthly quota
0.00 GB / 1.00 GB additional quota
0 / 5 daily conversions
/month
Email with pasword reset link sent.
Enter your email address and we'll send you a link to reset your password.
TIFF has been in use since 1986, when Aldus wrote it for the scanners and desktop publishing software of the day, and its design explains why it is still here. The file is a list of tagged fields, so a reader that does not understand a particular tag can skip it and still find the image. That extensibility is why TIFF carries what simpler formats cannot: several pages in one file, sixteen bits per channel, CMYK separations for print, or geographic coordinates in the GeoTIFF variant.
Compression is a choice rather than a property of the format. A TIFF may be stored uncompressed, packed with LZW or Deflate without losing a single pixel, or hold JPEG-compressed data inside. Archives and print shops tend to keep the lossless settings, which is why scans of documents and photographs meant for reproduction are stored this way despite the size.
The .tif spelling is not a different format. It dates from MS-DOS, where an extension could not exceed three characters, and it stayed because Photoshop and many scanners still write it by default. A .tif and a .tiff file are read by exactly the same software, and converting either behaves identically.
One thing worth knowing before converting: a TIFF may hold more than one page, and most formats cannot. When a multi-page .tif is converted to an image format that takes a single picture, each page comes back as its own file, packed together in a zip. Converting to PDF instead keeps the pages in one document, in the order they were scanned.