image/tiff

The archival and print-workflow container, flexible enough that two valid TIFFs can have almost nothing in common — which is why scanners love it and browsers mostly refuse to render it. Send it between imaging tools, not to web clients. The header declares its own byte order: II (Intel, little-endian) or MM (Motorola, big-endian) followed by the number 42, so a sniffer must accept both 49 49 2a 00 and 4d 4d 00 2a at offset zero.

.tif is the DOS-era three-letter spelling; .tiff and .tif are the same format.

Defined by RFC 3302 · IANA registration. Registry facts from the IANA media-types registry via mime-db.