The MIME type image/tiff is used to denote the presence of images stored in the Tagged Image File Format or TIFF. The category for this MIME type is "image".

The Tagged Image File Format is used to store images and the files carry the extension TIFF. The format was originally developed by a company called Aldus. Aldus was then bought out by Adobe. Consequently, the copyright of the TIFF specification came to Adobe and it is still held by Adobe. The format is currently supported by all major image manipulation applications, word processing applications, web development applications and many other applications that use image files in one way or the other. Despite such wide implementation and adoption of the TIFF format, the last major update to it was made in 1992 (at the time of writing).

Since then, Adobe has made only minor extensions to the TIFF format through technical notes released for the format. TIFF is popular because it is a flexible image-storing format that can easily be adapted to store images and data through the inclusion of header tags in various applications. These tags contain information such as size, definition, compression, etc.