TIFF

TIFF, formerly known as Tag(ged) Image File Format, is an image format capable of storing multiple high quality images in a single file.

A TIFF image may be uncompressed or use a compression scheme internally. Two of the most widely used compression schemes in TIFF files are lossless, including LZW and, for bitonal images CCITT Group 4, as used for facsimile transmission [fax]. JPEG baseline DCT-based lossy compression is also used.

Several subtypes and extensions of TIFF exist, including TIFF/EP, TIFF/IT, DNG, GeoTIFF, TIFF-FX, and BigTIFF. Multi-image TIFFs may represent sequences of images (such as scanned pages of a document), image tiles, or different versions of the same image, for example Pyramid TIFFs that incorporate images at different resolutions (often tiled). Some software that can read and display a TIFF file may only open the primary image.

Specifications

 * TIFF, Revision 6.0 (1992-06-03)
 * TIFF Revision 5.0 (1988-08-08)
 * HTML
 * Text
 * Tag Image File Format Rev 4.0 (1987-04-31)
 * HTML
 * Text
 * Adobe PageMaker 6.0 TIFF Technical Notes (1995-09-14)
 * Adobe Photoshop TIFF Technical Notes (2002-03-22)
 * Adobe Photoshop TIFF Technical Note 3 (2005-04-08)

Metadata tags

 * http://www.digitizationguidelines.gov/guidelines/TIFF_Metadata_Final.pdf
 * http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/formats/content/tiff_tags.shtml

Compression
Tag 259 indicates the image compression scheme, as a coded integer. Some of the known compression schemes are listed below.

Color types
Tag 262 indicates the color type ("photometric interpretation") of the image, as a coded integer. Some of the defined color types are listed below.

Related formats
See also Category:TIFF.

Tag 32932 contains TIFF annotation data.

Tag 33723 contains IPTC data.

Tag 34377 contains Photoshop Image Resources.

Tags 34665 (Exif IFD), 34853 (GPS IFD), and 40965 (Interoperability IFD) point to Exif directories.

Tag 34675 contains an ICC profile.

Sample images

 * http://www.fileformat.info/format/tiff/sample/index.htm
 * http://www.remotesensing.org/libtiff/images.html
 * http://people.sc.fsu.edu/~jburkardt/data/tif/tif.html
 * https://github.com/openplanets/format-corpus/tree/master/tiff-examples