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Size Matters: Why Businesses Use The TIFF File Format

October 20, 2008
by Snowbound Software
4 Comments

TIFF images are the popular choice among many business sending documents electronically. The reason: size. TIFF image files are, on average, two to three times smaller than PDFs, which means they can be sent faster, use less bandwidth,and take up less disk space so more of them can be stored on a single server. This makes them the perfect choice for businesses needing to cost effectively catalog thousands of electronic documents.

What’s Weighing Down PDFs?
Here are some of the factors that contribute to the large file sizes of PDF files:

  • Color
  • Form data
  • Embedded images
  • Embedded documents
  • Font
  • Compression

Due to the need for file viewers to handle all of the components of PDF files, PDF readers generally take longer to start up and load documents than TIFF readers.

Why TIFF is the Better Choice
This file format has been around since 1986 and has quickly become an industry standard. Part of this industry dominance is because viewers are often free of charge and there is no specific software is needed to view them. Also, back even a decade ago, PDFs were very expensive to produce and most scanners and digital cameras produced TIFF files by default. This put TIFF in the position to be the most standard file format. While consumers do not use TIFF as much because many of them send image and color heavy files best suited for PDF, businesses do not need this functionality for the majority of their transactions. Keeping files small and manageable is what makes TIFF the best choice for business.

TIFF in Action
Countrywide is a huge insurance company which receives PDFs of accident reports from its vendors. They have central processors processing documents from hundreds of venders sending in these forms. They convert all the PDFs to TIFF so documents being sent back and forth are roughly half the size of the original. They are not killing their networks with huge PDFs because the files are now lightweight, easier to transfer, and more controllable. While black and white is the most popular format there’s a lot of diversity in the TIFF family. There are formats like black and white, TIFF color, Tiff jpeg, etc. You’re able to store text and photos beyond just the original black and white, adding even more value to the TIFF format.

Final Thoughts
TIFF is far and away the best choice for businesses with large amounts of data and forms (e.g. insurance and mortgage companies) TIFF is historically a black and white file format, making it a good fit for sending things like checks, faxes, plain text documents, insurance forms, mortgage forms, etc. The bottom line: their small size saves business time and money by efficiently using both bandwidth and storage.

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4 Comments
  1. Richard January 5, 2009 at 7:07 pm Reply

    I’m glad to find your blog on .TIFF for business as I am reviewing an EDRMS service for my company at the moment, and have seen various comments about the format.

    I take it from your blog that there is a TIFF family, I’ve found a few members myself, of which Black & White is a member. Can you please help me, and tell me what size a single A4 of black & white text would be?

    many thanks

  2. Chris January 7, 2009 at 11:15 am Reply

    Hi Richard,

    The size of a TIFF image can depend on many factors.

    The DPI (dots per inch) is the resolution of the document, and the higher the DPI, the better the image looks. However, the size increases as the DPI goes up. Typical values are 200 or 300 for text documents.

    Since we are talking about black & white TIFF images, the compression typically used is G4. TIFF is a container format, so it can house many different types of compressions, such as JPEG and LZW. G4 compression is 1-bit (b&w). Color images are 24 or 32 -bit, and greyscale is 8-bit. The more bits, the bigger the size.

    A single page black & white A4 TIFF with G4 compression at 300DPI could be as small as a few KB with a small amount of text, to around 40-50KB for a page full of text.

    By comparison, the same page in TIFF with JPEG compression is around 700-800KB for a full page of text.

  3. jamesbang May 21, 2009 at 3:40 am Reply

    Hello
    I`m glad to find the blog.
    Now I met a problem on dealing with tif image file.
    this tif image is formatted by TIFF_G3_FAX and
    PhotometricInterpretation is 1(Min-is-Black).
    but when it was displayed by my Applet app, the color became Min-is-White.
    The API “IMG_decompress_bitmap(java.io.DataInputStream, int)” is used

    But other type tif images aren’t problem.

    The Snowbound version is V8.

    could you tell me the reason?

    Thanks a lot.

    Jamesbang

  4. Krishna June 22, 2011 at 11:13 pm Reply

    I have a tiff file size is around 48 mb it contains around 450 to 500 pages where as there is another ebook it contains more tha1000 pages and just around 6 mb it is in pdf format why such a difference wheras tiff should take less mb’s im finding it difficult to handle this ebook as it gets hanged while surfing from one page to other Im using macbook with 2.13 ghz processor 2 gb ram. please advice how to reduce the tiff file size any free online software, I tried saving in pdf format on my mac but it the size of file overshoots to around 500 mb idont know why the ebook is a mythological book whith no diagrams just written content and may be some photos not exceeding 5 pages.

    Please help.

    Regards,
    Krishna

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