Differences between TIFF,TIF,tiff,tif
Solution 1:
They all represent the same TIFF file format. The canonical spelling would be .tiff
, but short .tif
is recognized almost everywhere. Upper-case .TIFF
and .TIF
are less common, but Windows recognizes them.
The short
.tif
extension comes from the "8.3" limitation of MS-DOS and 16-bit windows. While newer operating systems do not have such restrictions, many people are still reluctant to use newer features (there even happen holy wars against spaces in names, but it's another topic) or typetif
out of habit.The upper-case variations might have been introduced in a similar way: Windows filenames are case-insensitive, and older operating and file systems weren't case-preserving either: even Windows 9x would still occassionally force a file name to all-upper or all-lower case, resulting in
NAME.TIF
instead ofName.tif
. (Windows NT and all Unix-based systems preserve case in file names.)
Solution 2:
Yes, the internal file format is the same.