A TIFF is a digital image file format used to store raster graphics with high quality and flexibility, often preferred for professional editing and printing due to its support for lossless compression, extensive color depth, and metadata tagging. Key points:

• Full name and purpose: TIFF stands for Tagged Image File Format, designed to store raster images with rich metadata and flexibility for professional workflows. It’s widely used in publishing, photography, and desktop publishing.

• Quality and flexibility: TIFF supports lossless compression options and high color depth (often 16 bits per color channel), making it ideal for archival storage and processing where image integrity is important.

• Variants and metadata: TIFF files can contain a variety of tags to describe image properties, color space, and even multi-page data; GeoTIFF is a common variant that embeds geographic location data for maps and aerial imagery.

• Typical uses: TIFF is commonly used when images must be edited and preserved without degradation, such as in professional photo editing, pre-press, scanning, and archival repositories.

• Common confusion: TIFF is different from more web-optimized formats like JPEG or PNG; it prioritizes fidelity and editability over small file size, which is why it’s less suited for everyday web use.

If you’d like, provide your use case (for example, archival storage, sending to a printer, or editing in a specific software), and the guidance can be tailored with file size considerations, color space, and recommended TIFF variants.