TIFF in a nutshell
TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) dates from 1986 and remains the workhorse of scanning, printing, photography archives and fax. A single TIFF can hold many pages, high bit depths and several compression schemes — flexibility that makes files large and support uneven. Only Safari displays TIFF natively, which is why this tool includes its own decoder.
Converting to GIF is handy for sharing scanned pages or fax documents as a quick, auto-playing preview, or for turning a sequence of microscope or time-lapse captures into an animation. For a lossless still of one page, GIF to PNG after converting gives a widely supported format.
Going the other way
Need TIFF output for print or archival workflows? GIF to TIFF writes every GIF frame as a page in a multi-page TIFF. Other document-style inputs are covered by PDF to GIF, and loose image files by Images to GIF.