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.

TI/A (formerly TIFF/A) is a proposed archival standard based on TIFF (but no longer using its name due to objections by Adobe, which owns the rights to the name TIFF) which is in progress of development.

Identification
TIFF files begin with bytes  (big-endian), or   (little-endian).

This does not account for BigTIFF format, which you may or may not consider to be a kind of TIFF.

File signatures
Some TIFF-like formats use a different file signature (the first few bytes of the file) to help identify them. Some of the known signatures are listed here.

(For formats lacking a public specification, this table may include a hypothetical signature for a byte order that has not been observed.)

Non-TIFF formats that could be mistaken for TIFF include:
 * 3DS
 * Picture Publisher

Compression
Tag 259 indicates the image compression scheme, as a coded integer. Some of the known compression schemes are listed below. Some of these are not used in genuine TIFF files, but only in other TIFF-like formats.

Unregistered/private/rogue compression codes:

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

Related formats
See also Category:TIFF.


 * Tag 700 contains XMP data.
 * Tag 32932 contains TIFF annotation data.
 * Tag 33723 contains IPTC-IIM data.
 * Tag 34152 is for AFCP.
 * 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.
 * Tag 37680: See OLE Property Set.
 * Tag 37724 (ImageSourceData) contains (after a 36-byte signature) a "series of tagged blocks", as described in the Photoshop PSD specification and the Adobe Photoshop TIFF Technical Notes document. In some TIFF files, this data has been observed to use little-endian byte order, with block signatures of "MIB8" instead of the usual "8BIM".
 * Tag 50933 (ExtraCameraProfiles) points to DNG camera profiles.
 * Raw camera formats are often based on TIFF.

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) - Defines tag 37724, compression types 7 and 8, photometric interpretation types 8 and 9
 * Adobe Photoshop TIFF Technical Note 3 (2005-04-08)
 * TIFF/A draft specification (2015-02)

Metadata tags

 * AWare Systems TIFF Tag Reference
 * http://www.digitizationguidelines.gov/guidelines/TIFF_Metadata_Final.pdf
 * http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/formats/content/tiff_tags.shtml

Metaformat files

 * Synalysis grammar file (for Hexinator / Synalize It!; more details)
 * Okteta structure file (for Okteta; more details)
 * Kaitai grammar file (for Kaitai; own implementation for TIFF)

Software
Most multi-format image viewers and editors support TIFF to some extent. Applications listed here have been selected arbitrarily.
 * Konvertor
 * TIFF.js
 * XnView
 * IrfanView
 * fixit_tiff (repairs TIFF files, example: broken datetime, wrong tag order and many more errors, also archeological tools included)
 * checkit_tiff (validates baseline TIFFs against textual rules, incredible fast and very deep analysis)
 * checkit_tiff (validates baseline TIFFs against textual rules, incredible fast and very deep analysis)

Sample files

 * http://www.fileformat.info/format/tiff/sample/index.htm
 * http://people.sc.fsu.edu/~jburkardt/data/tif/tif.html
 * https://github.com/openplanets/format-corpus/tree/master/tiff-examples
 * https://code.google.com/p/imagetestsuite/wiki/TIFFTestSuite
 * TIFF with old-style JPEG compression
 * https://telparia.com/fileFormatSamples/image/tiff/
 * https://telparia.com/fileFormatSamples/image/tiff/