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Most image formats are designed to make files smaller. TIFF was designed to make files complete, and that difference explains everything about where it is still used and why it is so large.
TIFF stands for Tagged Image File Format. It appeared in 1986, created by Aldus — the company behind PageMaker — to give desktop publishing a single format that scanners and printers could agree on. That was its job then, and it is still its job now.
The “tagged” part is the design: a TIFF is a container of labelled blocks. One tag says how wide the image is, another says what colour space it uses, another holds the actual pixels. Because the format describes itself through tags rather than a fixed layout, it has absorbed forty years of additions — layers, multiple pages, transparency, embedded colour profiles — without ever breaking older files.
That flexibility is also its weakness. Two files can both be valid TIFFs and use entirely different internal arrangements, which is why some software opens a TIFF another program wrote and reports an error.
A TIFF is usually stored uncompressed or losslessly compressed. Nothing is discarded. A 24-megapixel photograph that becomes a 6 MB JPG is roughly 70 MB as an uncompressed TIFF.
Lossless compression is available — LZW and ZIP are the common choices — and typically cuts the file by somewhere between a third and a half on photographic content, more on flat graphics. It is lossless, so there is rarely a reason not to use it. Even so, a compressed TIFF remains several times larger than a JPG of the same image.
The size is not a flaw. It is what you are paying for: every pixel exactly as captured, available to be edited any number of times without the degradation that a lossy format accumulates.
Print production. Commercial printers ask for TIFF or PDF, and they mean it. A JPG has already thrown away detail that the press would otherwise have reproduced.
Archival storage. Libraries, museums and government records use TIFF for digitised holdings, for a reason that has nothing to do with quality: the format is openly documented, forty years old and still readable. A file that must open in 2070 is safer in a format that already proved it can survive four decades.
Scanning. A scan is a one-time capture of something physical. Compressing it lossily at that moment throws away detail that cannot be recovered without going back to the paper.
Editing masters. Keep the TIFF, export JPGs from it. Re-editing a JPG re-compresses it every time; re-editing a TIFF does not.
Anything on the web. Browsers do not display TIFF, and the file sizes would be absurd if they did. Anything sent by email or messaging. Anything a recipient will open on a phone.
The usual mistake is archiving in TIFF and then also sending the TIFF. Archive the TIFF, send a JPG.
Desktop image software opens TIFF almost universally; browsers do not. If you have been sent one and cannot open it, converting to JPG or PNG is the practical move — JPG if it is a photograph, PNG if it has transparency or sharp-edged graphics.
Two cautions. First, converting TIFF to JPG is irreversible: the discarded data does not come back, so keep the TIFF. Second, a multi-page TIFF converted to JPG becomes multiple separate files, or just the first page — check which you got.
TIFF has outlived every format that was supposed to replace it, which in archiving is the only argument that has ever mattered.