Ask HN: Do you still use TIFF image format?

Sure, I encounter TIFF images when working on various datasets if that counts as using the format. One of the first things I do though tends to be converting the tiff images into a more common format. Once the conversion is complete I don't need to worry about which apps/tools have limited support for TIFF files.

Yes, it's almost the exclusive format for cultural heritage object documentation in museums (I'm Senior Scientist at the Rijksmuseum). It's wonderfully versatile in terms of number of bands, storage format (uint8, uint16, float, double, etc.), compression, metadata, and, with the BigTIFF extension, it's basically unlimited in the size of the images it can store. As an example, my 717 GP image of Rembrandt's Nightwatch [1] is archived as a 5.6 TB TIFF file.

Another advantage is that it permits a tiled storage format so that pulling rectangular regions out of a huge file can be very efficient compared to formats that require scanline-based storage. On the other hand, if one uses uncompressed scanline-based storage, it is also possible to memmap the pixel data for a huge TIFF image directly into a big array and to trivially manipulate it in your programming language of choice.

[1] https://hyper-resolution.org/Nightwatch5

There are many image formats that are TIFF formats under another name. For instance most Camera RAW files are variants of TIFF

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_image_format

So I use TIFF almost every day both in the form of RAW files from my Sony digicam and the DNG files that Adobe Lightroom can convert to them.

Visual Effects artist here. Nope. We're all on EXRs mainly (and of course JPGs)

https://www.openexr.com/

Then again I can't speak for all studios and all departments. But I think it's generally true except for some outliers.

Pretty often, when I need to work with floating-point images or uncommon number of channels and not limited to Python (where .npy is more convenient).

Also used it some time ago for binary images since it supports the CCITT Group4 and JBIG2 compression.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoTIFF is still used for processing and exchanging satellite imagery.

No, but I've used TGA in a few projects because it's so incredibly easy to write a header and dump the framebuffer into a file and then you've got a screenshot.

The SVS format used by Leica pathology slide scanners is actually TIFF/BigTIFF.

Why is this question being asked?

It’s a de facto format in eDiscovery (litigation document disclosure).

It's still the go to format for prepress.

All the time.

yes, widely used in banking still. i still extract thousands a day.

yes, as an hdr format.