The Tagged Image File Format once used to store or exchange a compressed fax page, separate from the fax standard itself.
- TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) is a file format for storing image data, not a fax transmission standard on its own.
- A fax page compressed with MH, MR, or MMR was often stored or exchanged as a TIFF file once it reached a computer.
- TIFF is a container: it can hold image data compressed in several different ways, fax-related or otherwise.
- TIFF is a supported image format for upload to Fax.Plus; sent and received faxes can also be viewed in the account.
What Is TIFF?
TIFF, short for Tagged Image File Format, is a general-purpose file format for storing image data, not a fax transmission standard in its own right. Where MH, MR, and MMR encoding define how a page's pixels get compressed during transmission, TIFF is simply a container that can hold that compressed image data once it lands on a computer, historically the most common way a received fax page was saved and shared as a digital file.
TIFF vs. Fax Standards
It's easy to conflate the two because they showed up together so often: a fax modem would decompress a JBIG-encoded transmission or an MH/MR/MMR one and save the result as a TIFF file for the recipient's fax software to display or print. But TIFF itself has nothing to do with how the page was transmitted, the same format stores plenty of images that were never faxed at all.
Fax.Plus and File Formats
TIFF is one of the supported upload formats for sending with Fax.Plus. Every sent and received fax lives directly in the account's fax storage, viewable and downloadable from the web or mobile app without needing to know what format sits underneath it.
A Common Case: Opening an Old Faxed Record
An administrative team retrieving a years-old faxed record from a legacy archive finds the file saved in TIFF format and needs image-viewing software that can actually open it, unlike a modern PDF most current tools handle by default.
FAQs
Is a TIFF file the same thing as a fax?
No. TIFF is just a file format for storing image data. A fax is transmitted using a separate standard, and only sometimes ends up saved as a TIFF file afterward.
Do Fax.Plus users ever need to open or manage a TIFF file directly?
You can upload a TIFF file to send it with Fax.Plus. You do not need to work with TIFF specifically to use the service: other supported documents, including PDF and Word files, can be uploaded too, and sent and received faxes can be viewed in your account.
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