TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) is a widespread pixel based graphics file format.
It is a very flexible format for storing raster graphics that supports many different color formats and compression algorithms and is even capable to hold more than one image in a single file (for example to store different versions of the same image in one file; so called Multi Page TIFF). The TIFF file format specification is owned by Adobe, but is open to public and can be downloaded from their website [1] free of charge (the latest version is revision 6.0 and was released on June 3, 1993).
Originally, TIFF was developed by a company named Aldus (now merged with Adobe) in corporation with Microsoft to become a vendor independent standard for the desktop scanner market [2] [3].
Today it is one of the most popular interchange formats for raster graphics, mainly used when working with images of high quality. It is a standard in print media preproduction and, for example, digital photography [2] [3]. Therefore TIFF support is a must for advanced graphics software in general and all the software used in those particular fields of application mentioned above.
The main strength of TIFF is its high flexibility, platform independence and the support by many applications. But this flexibility also leads to compatibility issues, as a TIFF reader usually won't be able to interpret all the TIFF files with their various extensions out there, where programmers are free to add new ones whenever they need to [3] [4]. The use of 32bit integer offsets in the file structure not only causes that TIFF can't be used as streaming format, it also limits the size of a TIFF file to 4 GB [3] [4]. A cool feature about TIFF is the ability to store images separated into tiles rather than in Scanlines/Stripes as other formats do, which can be much more efficient when, for example, viewing large compressed images [3] [4]. Besides storing images as uncompressed data, TIFF supports the following compression algorithms [3] [4]:
[1] http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/tiff/index.html.
[2] Wikipedia, 2006. Tagged Image File Format.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TIFF
[3] Wikipedia, 2006. Tagged Image File Format.
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagged_Image_File_Format
[4] Niles Ritter, 1997. The Unofficial TIFF Homepage.
http://home.earthlink.net/~ritter/tiff/