TIFF

TIFF was developed by Aldus (later acquired by Adobe) in 1986 as a common format for scanner output. It supports multiple color spaces, bit depths up to 32 bits per channel, lossless compression, and multi-page documents within a single file — features that made it the standard archival format for scanned documents, medical imaging, and print production. TIFF's large file sizes and lack of native web browser support mean it rarely appears on the web, but it remains the preferred archival and working format in professional imaging workflows.

File extensions	.tiff, .tif
MIME type	image/tiff
Developer	Aldus / Adobe
First released	1986
Category	Images
Open standard	Yes

What opens TIFF files

• Adobe Photoshop
• Preview (macOS)
• GIMP
• Microsoft Office (as embedded image)
• IrfanView

Browse File Formats

Reference details for 53 file formats — extensions, MIME types, what opens each one, and how they convert.

7Z Archives ABW Documents AI Images AVIF Images AZW3 E-books BMP Images CSS Other CSV Spreadsheets DjVu E-books DOC Documents DOCX Documents EPS Images EPUB E-books FB2 E-books GIF Images GZ Archives HEIC Images HTML Documents ICO Images ISO Archives JPG Images JSON Other Keynote Presentations Markdown Documents MOBI E-books Numbers Spreadsheets ODP Presentations ODS Spreadsheets ODT Documents OTF Other Pages Documents PDF Documents PNG Images PPT Presentations PPTX Presentations PSD Images RAR Archives RAW Images RTF Documents SVG Images TAR Archives TeX / LaTeX Documents TIFF Images TSV Spreadsheets TTF Other TXT Documents WebP Images WOFF / WOFF2 Other WPD Documents XLS Spreadsheets XLSX Spreadsheets XML Documents ZIP Archives