Back in the days TIF was just a large uncompressed file. The initial format is older than GIF87a (no animation which people associate GIF nowadays with). It ha

Back in the days TIF was just a large uncompressed file. The initial format is older than GIF87a (no animation which people associate GIF nowadays with). It had header but that pretty much it. Of course the format developed with time and even added LZW once the patent expired. Currently TIF is all kind of things, so writing a fully feature reader is a proper challenge (perhaps not coding-wise, but understand it and implementing the myriads of types/extensions, etc.)