Tagged Image File Format · .tif

The TIFF format

Not one encoding but a container that can hold many. The long-standing standard in scanning, fax and prepress, and unreadable in a browser.

Asking what compression a TIFF uses has no single answer, and that is the point of the format. A TIFF is a directory of tagged fields describing how its image data is arranged and encoded, so two files with the same extension can be internally quite different.

The format itself

What TIFF actually is

Aldus created TIFF in 1986 for desktop publishing and scanning, and its architecture has outlasted the company. A TIFF begins with a header pointing at an image file directory — a list of tags, each naming a property such as width, bit depth, colour interpretation, resolution, compression method, or the offsets at which the image data physically sits. A reader parses tags rather than assuming a fixed layout.

That makes TIFF a container rather than an encoding. The data inside may be stored uncompressed, or compressed with LZW, ZIP/Deflate or PackBits, or with CCITT Group 3 or Group 4 for bilevel black-and-white scans, or even as JPEG data embedded in the TIFF structure. Group 4 in particular is extraordinarily efficient on scanned text, which is why it became the standard for fax and document archives.

Because a file can contain several image file directories chained together, TIFF is natively multi-page: a twenty-page scan is one file, not twenty. It also handles what print work requires — CMYK and other colour spaces, bit depths well beyond 8 per channel, and embedded ICC profiles for colour management. The flexibility has a cost. Its breadth means no single reader supports every valid variant, files are large, and no browser ships a native TIFF decoder at all.

Where it is the right answer

Common uses

01
Document and archival scanning, frequently multi-page with CCITT Group 4 compression
02
Fax transmission and stored fax archives, the historical home of bilevel TIFF
03
Prepress and commercial printing, where CMYK, high bit depth and ICC profiles matter
04
Master copies of photographs and artwork retained losslessly before any derivative is made
05
Scientific and medical imaging needing bit depths and metadata that consumer formats cannot express
06
Scanned source material fed into OCR to produce searchable documents

Both sides

What TIFF does well, and where it stops.

Strengths

Multi-page in a single file, which suits document scanning far better than one image per page
Choice of compression, including lossless schemes and the very efficient CCITT Group 4 for bilevel scans
Supports CMYK and other non-RGB colour spaces, with embedded ICC profiles for managed colour
High bit depths for work that needs tonal precision beyond 8 bits per channel
Extensible tag structure, which is why the format has stayed useful for nearly four decades

Limitations

Browsers cannot decode TIFF natively, so it cannot be displayed on a web page without conversion.
We offer no TIFF conversion tools. Reading TIFF client-side would mean shipping a large decoder to every visitor, and our privacy model forbids the alternative of uploading your file to a server to convert it.
Files are large, sometimes dramatically so — an uncompressed high-resolution scan can run to hundreds of megabytes.
The format’s flexibility works against interoperability: a valid TIFF using an unusual tag combination may fail to open in software that handles ordinary ones fine.
Poor choice for sharing. Recipients on phones and in web applications frequently cannot open it at all.

Specification

Technical detail

The facts worth knowing before choosing TIFF for a job, rather than after.

Full name: Tagged Image File Format
MIME type: image/tiff
Extensions: .tif, .tiff
Introduced: 1986, by Aldus
Architecture: Tag-based container, not a single encoding
Compression options: Uncompressed, LZW, ZIP/Deflate, PackBits, CCITT Group 3/4, JPEG-in-TIFF
Multi-page: Supported via chained image file directories
Colour support: RGB, CMYK, greyscale, bilevel, high bit depths, embedded ICC profiles
Browser support: No native decoder in any mainstream browser

Questions about TIFF

Why can I not convert a TIFF on this site?

Two reasons that pull in the same direction. No browser can decode TIFF natively, so we would have to ship a sizeable decoder to everyone who loads the page, including the many visitors who will never touch a TIFF. The usual workaround — sending your file to a server to be converted — is exactly what this site refuses to do. We would rather be honest about the gap than break the promise.

What is the practical way to get a TIFF into a PDF?

Convert it to PNG or JPEG first using software on your own machine — Preview on macOS, Photos or Paint on Windows, most image editors anywhere — choosing PNG for bilevel document scans and JPEG for photographs. Then use our JPG to PDF or PNG to PDF tool on the result, which runs entirely in your browser.

I have scanned documents as TIFF and want them searchable. What is the route?

That is the common case, and the end goal is a searchable PDF. Convert the pages to PNG or JPEG, assemble them with PNG to PDF or JPG to PDF, then run OCR PDF over the result to add a text layer. The finished document is then searchable and works everywhere.

Should I keep scans as TIFF or as PDF?

For a long-term master, TIFF is defensible: it is lossless, multi-page and holds full scanner metadata. For anything you need to send, read on a phone, or search, PDF is far more practical. Many archives keep both — a TIFF master and a PDF access copy.

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