TIFF files in the digital collections
- Eddie Rubeiz
(This is a companion page to Oral history audio files , which talks about audio files.)
As of 2025 we have almost eighty thousand TIFFS in the digital collections. The format is very flexible: you can store the same image as a TIFF in many different ways. This flexibility, combined with the number of TIFFS already in our care, poses a challenge.
TIFF as a format
“The TIFF format was originally developed by the Aldus Corporation, and was intended primarily for use in scanning and desktop publishing. Aldus first published the specification in 1986. […] The current version of the specification (revision 6.0) was released in 1992.
TIFF supports colour depths from 1- bit to 24- bit […] , and a wide range of compression types […], as well as uncompressed data. […]. TIFF also incorporates perhaps the most comprehensive metadata support of any raster format, allowing the addition of a wide variety of technical and resource discovery information to be included. TIFF is designed to be an extensible format, and new tags can be registered with Adobe. A number of official and unofficial extensions exist, but should be treated with care since support may not be widespread.
Adobe owns the TIFF specification, but makes it freely available for use. […] TIFF is one of the most flexible, popular and widely supported raster formats in use today. The full technical specification for TIFF revision 6.0 is freely available from the Adobe website.”
https://cdn.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/information-management/graphic-file-formats.pdf
Are we preserving files or images?
Yes.
On the other hand, we are responsible for preserving the TIFFs in our care with as few changes as possible.
On the one hand, allowing too much variation in the TIFFS that we ingest may interfere with our concomitant responsibility to preserve the images in the files, which becomes difficult if the files are too different either from each other, or from common usage.
What kinds of TIFFs are allowed in the digital collections?
Here’s what we currently allow:
Type of tiff | In current collection? | Ingest allowed? | Test | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Zero images | no | no |
| We’ve been rejecting empty audio and image files for some time. |
One image | yes | yes |
| Trivial case |
Multiple layers | no | no |
| Our software can’t create derivatives for these. |
Multiple pages | yes | no |
| There are likely several of these in the digital collections. |
Embedded preview | yes | yes |
| Common both in general use and in the digital collections. |
Embedded previews appear common both general use and in our collections. They are probably harmless and it seems impractical to remove them all from the digital collections.