TIFF is the format of scanners, archives, and professional photo and print workflows - the file people reach for when they want an uncompressed, archival master. That reputation for being a neutral, technical container is exactly why its metadata gets overlooked: a TIFF carries the same full EXIF, GPS and IPTC a camera JPEG does.
Scan a TIFF fileA TIFF stores EXIF natively, so a photograph saved as TIFF keeps the whole camera record: make, model, exposure settings and capture timestamps, and, if location was on, the complete GPS block with coordinates, altitude, bearing, speed and UTC time. A scan or a shot exported to TIFF for archiving carries all of it forward.
TIFF is heavily used in photojournalism and stock, so it is a common carrier of IPTC. That includes the creator or by-line, the by-line title, credit and source, and the place fields: city, province or state, country and sub-location. These name a person and a place directly, in plain text, independent of any GPS coordinates.
Scanner and software fingerprints come along too. The Software and Host Computer tags name the application and machine that produced or last touched the file, often a scanner driver or a batch tool, and XMP DocumentID and InstanceID link the file to an original and to every saved version. For a document people think of as a plain scan, that is a lot of provenance.
One practical note: TIFFs are often very large. File X-Ray reads metadata from the first 30 MB of the file, where EXIF, IPTC and XMP live, and tells you when a bigger file was truncated rather than silently skipping anything. Automatic1111-style AI recipes stored in a TIFF's EXIF UserComment are read as well.
This is a selection. The full field manual documents the fields read from each format.
Full EXIF (make, model, exposure, timestamps), a GPS block with coordinates and altitude, IPTC creator and place fields (city, province/state, country), the Software and Host Computer tags, XMP document and instance IDs, an ICC colour profile, and - when the source was a camera photo - the maker note with the body serial.
Not really. The Software and Host Computer tags name the scanner software and the machine that made it, IPTC fields can name a creator, and a photo archived as TIFF keeps its GPS and camera data. A file people treat as a plain scan often carries real provenance.
Re-save it without the EXIF, IPTC and XMP, or use the clean copy this page produces, which removes the metadata while keeping the image itself. TIFF is one of the formats File X-Ray can strip in your browser.
Yes. Very large TIFFs are read up to the first 30 MB, which is where EXIF, IPTC and XMP live, and File X-Ray tells you when a bigger file was truncated rather than skipping anything silently.
File X-Ray reads TIFF files entirely in your browser - the file never leaves your device. For this format you can also download a clean copy with the metadata removed. Scan a file now.