TIFF stands for Tagged Image File Format. The latest published specification of the format is TIFF version 6.0.

TIFF is a de facto standard that is widely used for storing archive versions of images. The TIFF format is flexible and supports compression methods. Multiple pages can be stored in a file and metadata can be included in the ‘file headers’ or ‘tags’. The TIFF format supports the embedding of EXIF metadata and GeoTIFF metadata for georeferencing.

In general, ‘TIFF uncompressed baseline v.6’ is considered the only suitable TIFF format for archiving purposes, although extensions such as GeoTIFF and TIFF / EP (both with specialized metadata) are equally acceptable and based on this standard.

As ‘TIFF uncompressed’ stores images without compression, the files can become very large. If it is not a problem to apply compression, an alternative file format such as JPEG can be chosen.

TIFF is a preferred format for file type Images (raster).