TIFF

Stands for "Tagged Image File Format." It is a graphics file format created in the 1980s to be the standard image format across multiple computer platforms. The TIFF format can handle color depths ranging from 1-bit to 24-bit. Since the original TIFF standard was introduced, people have been making many small improvements to the format, so there are now around 50 variations of the TIFF format. So much for a universal format. Recently, JPEG has become the most popular universal format, because of its small file size and Internet compatibility.

File extensions: .TIF, .TIFF

Published: 2003