What Is a TIFF File? The Format for Print, Scanning and Archives

Why TIFF exists: maximum fidelity

A TIFF is typically stored losslessly (or entirely uncompressed), so it keeps the full, exact image with no quality thrown away — the opposite trade-off from JPG. It also supports very high bit depths (16 bits per colour channel rather than the usual 8), multiple layers, and multiple pages in a single file, which is why scanners often produce multi-page TIFFs for documents. Crucially for print, it can carry CMYK colour and embedded colour profiles, so a print shop receives exactly the colours the designer intended.

This fidelity is the whole point. A photographer keeps a TIFF (or camera raw) as the master, a print house wants TIFF for a brochure, and an archive stores TIFF because it will still open and look identical in fifty years. It is a format for keeping and producing, not for sharing casually.

The cost: very large files

Because it preserves everything, TIFF files are big — often tens of megabytes for a single high-resolution image, and far more for multi-page scans. A brochure's worth of TIFF images can run to hundreds of megabytes. That is fine on professional hardware and storage, but it makes TIFF hopeless for anything that has to move over email or the internet, where a JPG one-fiftieth the size looks indistinguishable on screen.

TIFF is also less universally supported than JPG or PNG: web browsers generally will not display a TIFF, many everyday apps and upload forms reject it, and phones often cannot preview one. It lives in professional and archival tools, not in the general-purpose places most images travel through.

When to use TIFF (and when to convert away from it)

Use TIFF when you are producing for professional print, archiving documents or images for the long term, scanning at high quality, or keeping a lossless master you will edit further. In all of these, its size is a worthwhile price for its fidelity, and downstream professional software expects it.

The moment a TIFF needs to leave that world — to be emailed, uploaded to a website, viewed on a phone, or posted online — convert it to JPG (for photographs) or PNG (for graphics and text). The converted file will be a tiny fraction of the size and will open everywhere, and for on-screen viewing nobody will see the difference. Keep the TIFF as your archived master and send the lightweight copy.

How to open and convert a TIFF

On a desktop, the built-in photo viewers on Windows and macOS open most TIFFs, as do professional editors; browsers and phones often cannot. To make a TIFF usable everywhere, convert it to JPG or PNG with an image converter, then compress or resize if you need it smaller still. If you have a stack of TIFF scans that belong together — say, the pages of a document — combining them into a single PDF is often more useful than juggling separate image files. OfficePad handles all of this in the browser, so even large scans are never uploaded.

Frequently asked questions