TIFF

TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) is the heavyweight raster format used in archiving, scanning and professional imaging. Its name comes from its structure: a flexible set of tags describing the image, which lets a single TIFF hold uncompressed or losslessly compressed data, high bit depths, embedded colour profiles and a great deal of technical metadata.

Two features make it a workhorse in document workflows. First, it can be multi-page, so an entire scanned book or a long fax can live in one TIFF file, which is why scanners and archives lean on it. Second, it preserves maximum quality: TIFF is the format of record when you cannot afford the detail loss that JPEG would introduce. The cost is size, uncompressed TIFFs are large, which is precisely why they are usually converted to PDF for everyday sharing and storage.

Converting a multi-page TIFF scan into a PDF makes it portable, viewable anywhere and ready for OCR. Handling those archival scans on your own machine matters, since they are often the original record of sensitive documents.