TIFF vs. JPG: Which Format Should You Use?

If you work with scanned documents, print photography, or medical imaging, you have undoubtedly encountered the TIFF format. TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) has been around since the 1980s, and it remains the gold standard for lossless image archiving.

The primary difference between TIFF and JPG is compression. JPG uses 'lossy' compression, meaning it permanently throws away minor visual data to shrink the file size. Every time you open, edit, and save a JPG, it loses a little more detail. TIFF, on the other hand, is generally uncompressed or uses 'lossless' compression. It retains exactly 100% of the original image data, layer information, and deep color depth.

Because they preserve everything, TIFF files are absolutely massive—often 10 to 50 times larger than a JPG of the same image.

You should use TIFF when archiving master copies of photographs, preparing images for high-end print magazines, or storing medical scans where zero loss of detail is acceptable.

However, you should absolutely convert TIFF to JPG when you need to send an image over email, upload it to a website, or view it on a mobile device. Web browsers and email clients struggle to render 100MB TIFF files, and the bandwidth costs are astronomical. Converting a TIFF to a high-quality JPG gives you a file that is virtually indistinguishable to the human eye, but weighs a fraction of the size and opens instantly on any device.